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The idea is terrible even from the first lines, relying on the hardware key attestation means giving up the id card to Google and Apple approved devices which i

The idea is terrible even from the first lines, relying on the hardware key attestation means giving up the id card to Google and Apple approved devices which is absolutely not what you want as a country.

lxgr 3y ago
I generally agree, although I do understand the motivation for requiring device attestation here: Since the card neither has a PIN pad, nor a display, there is a lot of trust on the mobile device to be honest when it comes to signature operations. Another solution would be an external, Bluetooth-connected terminal with both a PIN pad (or biometric authentication) and a display, but that would mostly defeat the purpose of using smartcards: The entire point of schemes like this is that users don't need to buy and carry yet another device beyond the smartphone and an ID card that they already own.
- realusername 3y ago
  What they probably want to know here I guess is "is this device secure?" and there's just no technical answer to that, the result of the key attestation doesn't help you one bit to decide that. The only way to do it is indeed to run some kind of computation on the device, usually those get plugged in to have more power. The key attestation has a very small list of things it's actually useful for anyways, it's generally a bad idea to use it.
  - lxgr 3y ago
    I mean, it can, to some extent: By only accepting attestations from an opt-in list of devices that the scheme operator has validated to be sufficiently secure. That approach has a lot of downsides, obviously. Unfortunately, what I'm often seeing is a "worst of both worlds" type of solution: There is a list of trusted (used as a proxy for secure) devices, but it's generated in a pretty arbitrary way. My government actually requires FIDO attestation in such a way, but for the longest time, the only trusted hardware authenticator was by a company I've never even heard of in this space – Yubico was not considered trusted.
    - realusername 3y ago
      > I mean, it can, to some extent: By only accepting attestations from an opt-in list of devices that the scheme operator has validated to be sufficiently secure. > That approach has a lot of downsides, obviously. Yes, the main one being that it doesn't scale at all, especially to an ID card level which is used in a whole country. > My government actually requires FIDO attestation in such a way, but for the longest time, the only trusted hardware authenticator was by a company I've never even heard of in this space – Yubico was not considered trusted. I'm not surprised much, governments are usually big fans of the not invented here syndrome and reinvent the wheel with paid consultants.
      - lxgr 3y ago
        Exactly! Ironically, Yubico is Swedish, yet the only supported authenticator is from a Taiwanese company, so something must have gone wrong in the usual scheme of "regional economic stimulus by expensive government contract" :) What smells really bad about it is that the only domestic reseller of that FIDO authenticator apparently is the government contractor that built the e-ID platform...
- crote 3y ago
  So don't use it to do any operations which require you to absolutely trust the smartphone? When it comes to interacting with the government, security is often more important than convenience. Having people go to their local police station to scan their card on a secure terminal is definitely worth it for high-profile operations.
  - lxgr 3y ago
    Maybe that could work for something like transferring property or other operations most people do only a few times in their lives, but there are tons of medium or low risk governmental things I would love to be able to do on my smartphone. For that, I'd rather have a relatively secure scheme that people can actually use, rather than a hypothetical perfect one that nobody owns the hardware for. As a concrete example: My government started out with very high ambitions. Every citizen got a smartcard holding a personal X.509 certificate (usable both for e-government, PDF signature, and S/MIME email signature/encryption!), and the government even gave USB CCID card readers away. The result? Absolutely nobody used it. A few years later, they replaced that with a solution that stores everybody's private keys on a central server, combined with SMS-OTP for signature approval... Tapping my ID card on my phone and entering a local PIN to sign, even if the phone isn't particularly trustworthy and signature requests could be spoofed, would be much, much more secure than that.
    - ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago
      DNIe vs Cl@ve Permanente?
crote 3y ago
Yeah, this feels like a huuuuge drawback to me. You are immediately prevented from creating an implementation which works on Windows/macOS/Linux, and it is reinforcing the Google/Apple duopoly in the smartphone market. Moreover, you are relying on "trusted execution" remaining unbroken in thousands of different dirt-cheap smartphone models. It's not a question of "if" it gets broken, but "when". And revocation isn't exactly an option either, because you risk leaving millions of people unable to use your government-mandated app. I believe that applications like these should be explicitly designed around the possibility of the user device being compromised or a malicious third party interacting with it instead - even if that means a loss of functionality. And while you are at it, make it fully open source to make it easier for the security community to review it for silly things like the self-rolled crypto we see here.
usr1106 3y ago
Seems like a government-supported activity to violate DMA.

lxgr 3y ago

I generally agree, although I do understand the motivation for requiring device attestation here: Since the card neither has a PIN pad, nor a display, there is a lot of trust on the mobile device to be honest when it comes to signature operations. Another solution would be an external, Bluetooth-connected terminal with both a PIN pad (or biometric authentication) and a display, but that would mostly defeat the purpose of using smartcards: The entire point of schemes like this is that users don't need to buy and carry yet another device beyond the smartphone and an ID card that they already own.

realusername 3y ago
What they probably want to know here I guess is "is this device secure?" and there's just no technical answer to that, the result of the key attestation doesn't help you one bit to decide that. The only way to do it is indeed to run some kind of computation on the device, usually those get plugged in to have more power. The key attestation has a very small list of things it's actually useful for anyways, it's generally a bad idea to use it.
- lxgr 3y ago
  I mean, it can, to some extent: By only accepting attestations from an opt-in list of devices that the scheme operator has validated to be sufficiently secure. That approach has a lot of downsides, obviously. Unfortunately, what I'm often seeing is a "worst of both worlds" type of solution: There is a list of trusted (used as a proxy for secure) devices, but it's generated in a pretty arbitrary way. My government actually requires FIDO attestation in such a way, but for the longest time, the only trusted hardware authenticator was by a company I've never even heard of in this space – Yubico was not considered trusted.
  - realusername 3y ago
    > I mean, it can, to some extent: By only accepting attestations from an opt-in list of devices that the scheme operator has validated to be sufficiently secure. > That approach has a lot of downsides, obviously. Yes, the main one being that it doesn't scale at all, especially to an ID card level which is used in a whole country. > My government actually requires FIDO attestation in such a way, but for the longest time, the only trusted hardware authenticator was by a company I've never even heard of in this space – Yubico was not considered trusted. I'm not surprised much, governments are usually big fans of the not invented here syndrome and reinvent the wheel with paid consultants.
    - lxgr 3y ago
      Exactly! Ironically, Yubico is Swedish, yet the only supported authenticator is from a Taiwanese company, so something must have gone wrong in the usual scheme of "regional economic stimulus by expensive government contract" :) What smells really bad about it is that the only domestic reseller of that FIDO authenticator apparently is the government contractor that built the e-ID platform...
crote 3y ago
So don't use it to do any operations which require you to absolutely trust the smartphone? When it comes to interacting with the government, security is often more important than convenience. Having people go to their local police station to scan their card on a secure terminal is definitely worth it for high-profile operations.
- lxgr 3y ago
  Maybe that could work for something like transferring property or other operations most people do only a few times in their lives, but there are tons of medium or low risk governmental things I would love to be able to do on my smartphone. For that, I'd rather have a relatively secure scheme that people can actually use, rather than a hypothetical perfect one that nobody owns the hardware for. As a concrete example: My government started out with very high ambitions. Every citizen got a smartcard holding a personal X.509 certificate (usable both for e-government, PDF signature, and S/MIME email signature/encryption!), and the government even gave USB CCID card readers away. The result? Absolutely nobody used it. A few years later, they replaced that with a solution that stores everybody's private keys on a central server, combined with SMS-OTP for signature approval... Tapping my ID card on my phone and entering a local PIN to sign, even if the phone isn't particularly trustworthy and signature requests could be spoofed, would be much, much more secure than that.
  - ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago
    DNIe vs Cl@ve Permanente?

crote 3y ago

Yeah, this feels like a huuuuge drawback to me. You are immediately prevented from creating an implementation which works on Windows/macOS/Linux, and it is reinforcing the Google/Apple duopoly in the smartphone market. Moreover, you are relying on "trusted execution" remaining unbroken in thousands of different dirt-cheap smartphone models. It's not a question of "if" it gets broken, but "when". And revocation isn't exactly an option either, because you risk leaving millions of people unable to use your government-mandated app. I believe that applications like these should be explicitly designed around the possibility of the user device being compromised or a malicious third party interacting with it instead - even if that means a loss of functionality. And while you are at it, make it fully open source to make it easier for the security community to review it for silly things like the self-rolled crypto we see here.

usr1106 3y ago

Seems like a government-supported activity to violate DMA.