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Comment by paulajohnson | Hacker News Reader

Other governments take note: this is what good electronic security looks like.

Spain does the same. With you ID card chip, you can:

- sign your emails digitally - login to secure websites with your id card (bank, DMV, taxes, …). Sometimes you can only do it with the ID card - they opened many of their tools, so you can design your website to allow login with Spain's ID cards (that was a fun project)

Were these cards affected? Were there any official notices from authorities?

Even if not affected, it would be nice to hear an official comment.

I was discussing this with someone from Belgium and we agreed that silence from the Belgian government meant only one thing: nobody used the service. (Specifically: Belgian cards are the older Gemalto generation, thus not affected, like the older Estonian IDs.)

We have a similar system in Austria and I got curious when ROCA was announced. Turns out the cards here generate ECDSA keys and are thus not affected. Naturally, there was no announcement of any kind, so this took quite a bit of sleuthing to figure out.

Maybe Spain happens to use ECC keys too.

For those wondering: "upgrading the Estonian ID cards" means switching to ECC (P-384).

New certificates are generated on the chip, and the public part is then transmitted to the government public keys directory.

How do they authenticate the new ECC policy key when the RSA key is already compromised?

You don't. Hence, the upgrade system has been disabled now, which is TFA.

Am Estonian. The remote upgrade system is still working, but only enabled for high-priority users right now because of the high load - medical professionals, social workers, people who used the card more than 100 times over the past 3 months. It will be re-enabled for all users at the start of next week, maybe earlier if the high-priority users have all been serviced.

Spanish cards (DNIe) generate their keys themselves

They all do, that's the idea of a HSM.

Do you have a link to that project? (login with Spanish ID)

Government handled it pretty well, but the chip maker (Gemalto) hid the security problem for months before telling its customers.

And can't find any information about security breach in Gemalto's website...

Slovakia invalidated them 3 days ago and is moving to 3072bit keys.

However, our minister of the interior "Robert Kalinak" announced that they should hack his if its real threat. The only thing which he didn't mention is that his public key isn't publicly available...

Other governments take note his is what putting all your eggs in one basket looks like.

In the U.S. we also put all our eggs in one basket, but instead of that basket being a digital certificate/smartcard, it's a nine-digit number that we use as both userid and password.

Comparing many things to the US is setting a pretty low bar.

Except all eggs aren't in one basket - ID card cert usage will be blocked but you can still use Mobile-ID to sign documents, log into govt websites and do everything else that you can do with your ID card.

https://e-estonia.com/solutions/e-identity/mobile-id/

More like 3 baskets. Estonians can also use a Mobile ID, where private keys, authentication and signature functions are stored on a special SIM card. More recently, an app based Smart ID was also introduced. If you're on one of those services, the certificate revocation doesn't really affect you.

All easy targets for the bear next door - and maybe having a national ID card is not such a good idea in the first place

Clarification: Smart ID does not (yet) have the same functionality as Mobile-ID or ID Card (you can log into some supported services with it but that's about it).

AFAIK they're working on it to get it to the same level so you could give official signatures and log into govt services etc using that as well.

There is only one basket that is made to look that there are three baskets. To get a Mobile-ID need to have an ID-card with valid certificates. If the certs are revoked you can't activate your Mobile-ID. Also you have to pay a monthly fee for Mobil-ID service. Smart-ID requires that you have an ID-Card or Mobile-ID and more importantly it's practically useless as you can't use it for any government services.

ID cards have been usable until yesterday and will be again soon. Mine was upgraded and is still useful.

You don't need it all the time, only to sign up. Your argument doesn't quite make sense.

If you need another basket to have access to it (even if only initially) then it's not really a separate basket on a national level.

Just like you need a valid e-mail to sign up somewhere. Except that here you won't need it afterwards (even if your ID is compromised, it can be blocked and the other systems provide secure identity.)

All of this is backed by the "single basket" of people actually showing up in the population registry office...

PS: I see, you have just joined HN to write these unsubstantiated comments.

So what's your actual threat model here? The Government decides to ban people from accessing Government services? Err... Or that some person might not be able to activate their Mobile ID for a short period of time while they sort out their ID cards?

The threat model is exactly people getting locked out of government services. If this seems silly or not important to you then you aren't aware just how widespread the usage of digital government services are in Estonia.

As one example most government procurements over a certain amount od money happen as e-procurements with strict time limits that can't be changed and bids need to be digitally signed. If you can't access digital government services you can neither access e-procurment site nor digitally sign you bid.

Right, but point is, you can quite easily have Mobile-ID and your ID card, and if something happens to your ID card you can still use Mobile-ID. I think.

If there's no redundancy measure for the ID card system failing - for example, automatically extending deadlines - that's a problem, and an easily solvable one at that, since it's mostly policy. It's not something against the ID card system.

And again, what the parent says in untrue. You can sign documents with your phone and still take part of the expiring public tender he describes.

Yes, but you need to already have Mobile-ID for that. To get a Mobile-ID you need ID-Card with valid certs.

So if a person doesn't already have Mobile-ID and their ID-Card certs are blocked they can't get a Mobile-ID and thus they can't access any digital government services.

It's not like this is purely theoretical - large number of Estonian Id-Card will have their certs blocked and not everyone has Mobile-ID.

1. Mobile-ID requires a pretty good cellphone connection to work properly and avoid getting timeouts.

2. Mobile-ID requires you to pay for signing up and after that, 1€/month to your mobile provider.

If you cant get your benefits you might not be be able to eat or heat your home hospitals might not be able to look up patients records etc

Not really, I can still use my mobile ID just fine. Not even in a hurry to get my certificates updated.

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