BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration

You can use the "Online-Personalausweis" for quite some things actually. For example to authenticate at banks, so you don't have to do Video-Ident. Or to do taxes etc. I wrote a post about it earlier this year: https://b.jlel.se/s/59c

I heard something yesterday about how you can authenticate digitally for tax documents using the NFC chip in your Personalausweis! You just have to download some app.

But yes, in general, we’re SO CLOSE…then you have to go do Anmeldung with a paper form in person

Its hilarious. I recently moved and wanted to update the registration info for my car. My city boasts about having an "online self service for anything you'd usually need" (sad enough that this alone is a rare achievement), so naive me decided to give it a try. I successfully registered and wanted to update the info on my car, but got stopped by a disclaimer saying "if you want to do this online with your eID, you need to attach a picture of your ID to the form"?!. I burst out laughing, wondering what the point of this eID even is. And I still haven't updated my info

A couple of years ago, I would have concurred. But for some time already you have the possibility to use the e-ID through Postident (https://www.deutschepost.de/de/p/postident/privatkunden/iden...) which is kind of well integrated in many businesses. Moreover you have private / corporate solutions like Verimi (https://verimi.de/) that incorporate functionalities of the e-ID. There is even an alternative (https://www.openecard.org/startseite/) to the official app. (EDIT: The alternative is open-source, but so is the official app. Removed adjective.)

I really like the development that has gone into the e-ID. They even have thought out a safe way to update your PIN (https://www.pin-ruecksetzbrief-bestellen.de/)! The biggest drawback of all is the lack of any marketing, IMHO.

Makes a lot of sense with German culture IMO. There's a culture of doing your job very well, but not much of a culture of thinking outside of the box or shaking things up.

Some Herr Doktor probably followed all the best practices to implement "trust zones, certificates, authorization features, and much more" in the ID, doing their job really well. But actually changing the processes to use those features is not anyone's job, and might actually eliminate a lot of jobs, so it never happened.

It's almost as if the spirit of the people was broken as Germany drifted more and more leftward.

I actually use my German ID card to communicate with the Elster service of the German tax offices. My old USB signing stick would need to be replaced next year, but using my ID card was the cheaper option.

Many more applications will come in coming years. They are being implemented right now, I think this was sped up by some law that municipalities have to provide those services online by 2026? Not sure. Anyway there is a huge backlog and not enough programmers but one way or another this has to be done.

In The Netherlands, they are implementing a thing which gives the same advantages (i.e. disclose some attributes about yourself without disclosing unneeded data), but uses different technologies. It's called IRMA, you can find an overview here [1]. It can be combined with other applications to do cool stuff, e.g. with PostGuard [2] you can use identity-based encryption to be able to send an encrypted email to someone, but without the need to know their public key in advance, nor having to authenticate it. The drawback is that you have to trust a central server and a third party identity provider.

[1] https://irma.app/ [2] https://postguard.eu/

Its fascinating what EU can accomplish, but in my mind drivers licenses and "national IDs" (that are usable when travelling in EU) should be merged and unified over the union. Imagine how much simpler things would be! And this tech used in Germany sounds like a very nice base for it.

I mean I would also make them passports but I think that is impossible.

The scars of WWII have well and truly healed if people are comfortable with this technology. The 1900s accrued a lot of experience with where this will go.

Usually I'll argue for market efficiency over other concerns; but in this case the Europeans are on to something with the GDPR. The role of government is to make this sort of personalised identification hard - not to enable it. The end game is going to be hard times and mass discrimination against minorities.

I use my Personalausweis to submit tax stuff, to get the current status of the government pension fund (I can know at any time, not just once per year how many Rentenpunkte I have) and to submit local requests for my city (for example changes for the garbage collection service). My phone serves as the card reader using NFC. It works like a charm.

Unfortunately still many people working in tec jobs do not understand that putting an ID on an official governmental document that you need to carry is effectively the same like a tattoo with a number on your arm.

Despite Germans have made bad experiences with that, the idea survived the 3rd Reich.

The idea that as a human being you need "governmental documents" to identify is an authoritarian core value that is fundamentally against individual freedom.

Jews were forced to always carry their "Kennkarte" with them.

Please do not tell me about positive use cases that are based on the naive idea that "the government is the good guys".

When electronic IDs are not rolled back everywhere then democracy and individual freedom will be lost for a very long time.

25 years of intentionally slowing down digitalization to protect local SMEs (which make 70-80% of the economy) against US tech companies leveraging economies of scale.

Yes there’s plenty corruption and disastrous bets (ISDN…), but let’s not pretend the situation isn’t intentionally created.

And we still have to walk to the doctor's office to get that prescription for the same Asthma medicine you always get every three months. Instead of just getting it electronically to the nearest pharmacy. Now we have to queue up in the doctor's office with sick people, wait for them to print and sign a red piece of paper and then walk to the pharmacy.

Maybe this changes too in the future?

Last time I lived in Berlin (until early 2020) my Hausarzt still used Telegram in her practice. Mostly to communicate between the front desk and the examination rooms.

I wonder how kosher it was.

Usually in the German health sector the use of existing standards is only there for marking off a checklist I have the feeling. In practice things are so heavily adapted that you often cannot use existing libraries.

Just look at the authentication of the E-Rezept (electronic prescription) service: https://github.com/gematik/api-erp/blob/master/docs/authenti... This is supposed to be standard OpenID.

I fully expect the matrix protocol to suffer the same treatment under the hand of the Gematik.

If you want to know how things end up such a chaos take a look at the definitions of the payload data: https://github.com/gematik/api-erp/blob/master/docs/erp_fhir...

6 different sets of definitions by 5 different regulating bodies, with the organizing company Gematik GmbH owned by 9 different stakeholders: https://www.gematik.de/ueber-uns/struktur

Meanwhile the E-Arztbrief which was supposed to replace FAX is a complete mess. The directory for mail addresses have not been strictly regulated. It's pretty much useless everywhere where big index databases of medical professionals already exist since find the proper mail address is a pain.

A friend working at a big radiology attempted to manage that since there are issues with FAX systems since ISDN technology has been boxed and the E-Arztbrief would have been a good solution. But when he started out comparing their database, he found awful problems. For example there are whole names in the surname field or names of a Doctor's office. You can't properly search and even if you do, you are never sure you got the right one.

Curiously many of the messengers you mentioned are or were at least initially based on the same protocol, XMPP, some of them even were interoperable for a time[0]. There are still attempts at realising interoperability, notably libpurple[1], but they are fighting a constant uphill battle. Sadly companies usually just have more incentives to either keep their services walled off or extend only theirs in functionality, rather then keeping them interoperable. This would only change through regulation, or I suppose if a federated service gains enough traction to become the de-facto standard, but given the fate of XMPP that seems unlikely.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP#Non-native_deployments

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin_(software)

The impact is not likely to be positive. Nearly every government in Europe will want access to the comms happening, particularly if it's within their borders or with their citizens. Europe is not likely to introduce an end-user-to-end-user encryption. It will be encrypted from end user to the government to the next end user.

Gematik co-funded the most recent Matrix audit of vodozemac[1], and is poised to fund 3 more (of matrix-rust-sdk-crypto, matrix-rust-sdk and the whole stack end-to-end) to ensure the E2EE is where it needs to be. So I'd say that the German government definitely cares about E2EE for its civil servants, and we're very grateful for them funding security research.

Meanwhile, BWI is helping fund the work needed to address clientside controlled room membership (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/391...) as highlighted in your paper, as well as TOFU... and they're also funding work to provide MLS as an option for E2EE in Matrix too[2].

Unsure why you're talking about the unexploitable IND-CCA break :)

[1] https://matrix.org/blog/2022/05/16/independent-public-audit-...

[2] https://www.golem.de/news/bwmessenger-vom-messenger-der-bund...

In this case, the slow digitisation had a good side-effect of allowing a open, decentralized encrypted messaging protocol to be maturely adopted.

Not much consolance for the German people, who still have to deal with a lot of paper administration but a happy accident nonetheless.

It hasn’t but it’s on the right track. I am working as a developer in one of the federal agencies and have direct contact with the efforts.

It helps a lot that public agencies can now offer a so called IT Zulage of a few hundred euros to 1000 per months that brings salaries on par with the private sector. In my team, this worked wonders and we managed to get some really good people.

On the other hand, the task is enormous, we were discussing last week that if we had double the man power, we would still have the same workload, because we push back on a lot of things. We have about 70 projects that we wrote and maintain and a backlog of another 12 waiting to be started.

BWI has the same problem, I’ve been approached multiple times by them for this project, which from my knowledge is being intensely worked since many years.

The large degree of federation in the German government is something that has traditionally shown some of its ugliest sides when in comes to digitalization (e.g. every state comissioning their own underpowered solutions which are 95% identical in spec instead of pooling resources).

I think that's exactly why Matrix might be a good fit, as the technical federation aligns well with the pre-existing social federation. I'm really optimistic for that project!

Things can change. Easy to forget that Alan Turing and a certain German called Konrad Zuse both get credit for having invented the modern computer. Generally, people seem to like to give that honor to Alan Turing and Konrad Zuse does not get a lot of love. Not that it matters either way; but this is a country that co-created modern computing. Pre and post-war Germany featured a lot of rapid change and technical innovation.

I'm based in Germany and I share the sentiment that things have been a bit backwards here in terms of a widespread reluctance to let go of paper based administration. This was awkward 14 years ago when I moved here and at this point it's just beyond pathetic. But things are changing. Germans are well aware that people outside of Germany are noticing how far behind they are and are shaking their heads at those silly naive German paper fetishists. So, there's a lot of domestic pressure to actually start fixing this. The covid crisis in the last few years forced a lot of Germans to do things with their phone that until then were completely unheard off in this country. Like paying for stuff or proving that they didn't have covid. That used to be a thing where paper and rubber stamps were the only acceptable solution.

So, I look at this as something that can change quite rapidly after not having changed much at all for decades. The will and money are there and Germans are starting to remember that they can actually get some stuff done when they put their mind to it. We're also seeing this with the current energy crisis. That crisis has unlocked budgets all over the public sector. And "digitalization" (as it is referred to here) is part of those budgets. Germans love efficiency and people have been pointing out that they haven't been very efficient. Which is embarrassing and annoying. So, they are fixing it now. There are now countless of bureaucrats tasked with actually showing some results for the inflated budgets they've been given. We're talking hundreds of billions of euros here. It's not all going to be spend wisely but some of it will yield results.

This was possible only because Ursula vdL is not in charge of Bundeswehr any more.

That being said, god save the EU, since these walking tax-money black hole is now leading the whole EU.

That is sad to hear. You hear criticism of public IT stuff here in Norway too, but it mostly works. Like I got e-receipt since 2013. Can order new prescriptions, book appointments , look at test results online online. Well the latter doesn’t always work. But everything with taxes and banking had long been all electronic and working fine.

It is based in French software... so... maybe?!

In the 2000/2001 the defense minister (Rudi something) wanted to have a direct communication channel to all officers of the army. They contracted the Telekom (aka T-Mobile). The result was a parallel modem line network with extra PCs next to the well established communication network of the army. It was called Rudiphone and a the most stupid project ever.

So yes, visions where always there but the implementation was indeed always a story

>the Russians (Telegram, prolly not)

I wouldn't call it a "Russian" system. Just consider where Durov currently resides and has his wealth.

I don't know why the person who was first to respond to you is "dead" but set aside his value judgement; all he wrote is factually correct. The embarrassment you speak of lies in the fact that it became public knowledge, not in the act itself, depending on the perspective of specific institutions. Furthermore, disregarding the fact that signal is in Israeli hands, i'm fairly certain they don't even trust themselves and simply calculate and spread risks as they see fit. Regarding your Munich example, the most significant factors for the outcome of that debacle where at one end incompetent people backed by powerless competent people and on the other end Microsoft with millions of lobby money backed by a powerful state actor. Both can easily be regarded as both a risk and opportunity for state security. Your closing statement is of course indisputable, never the less we should not forget that despite the fact that times change; old adagia such as "Something you have, something you are, something you know" are not only easily understood by everyone but we are also getting there with for example the advent of cheap FIDO2 keys, fairly invisible network access control & encryption at device enrollment, infrared cameras, privacy respecting / agnostic AI driven real-time analytics & heuristics at scale and so on. In other words, we are slowly getting there but not due things such as "having a BundesMessenger" unless it's weaknesses contribute to the drive for improvement ~ including replacing American cloud services ~ ; something it's open source nature definitely does.

Now I'm just waiting for the Matrix app that I don't hate.

And for that matter, the SMTP app that I don't hate.

The article mentions it directly.

Tchap is doing great actually :)

It does sponsor some development, although we still have a big gap on overall Matrix funding currently (hence trying to drum up additional sponsors and support via https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/01/funding-matrix-via-the-ma...).

we’ll miss you :’(

What angle is in your question? Matrix is the best choice i could imagine. And the lobbyists of Google, Microsoft and Apple surely had better funding than anyone touching matrix.

If your ask whether a consulting agency earned something between 10 and 100 million on that decision you are most likely right. But I guess overall it was probably the CCC influence on the politics and the population. The club and their members are much more influential than you would expect.

Especially considering that the most recent arrested terrorists targeted police and military employees as conspirators.

But honestly all much better than the NSA listening into German state traffic. The big fives are not friends just allies.

The infrastructure is managed by Germanys public administration.

The French utilize matrix for military operations as well. This isn’t “some random company”.

Random is pretty load bearing here. The BWI GmbH was literally created to operate the armies non-military IT infrastructure.

The article is pretty explicit in that BWI are not running but packaging a reference software.

And aside how do you think that anywhere in the world software for the army is created. It is called military industrial complex for a reason.

Element X is a native app, and will replace Element Desktop for many purposes, fwiw (and will be also adopted by BundesMessenger)

That's the advantage of choosing Matrix: it is compatible with a multitude of clients and servers, so take your pick. No need to install the BundesMessenger frontend. No need to trust the government, how very un-German.

Currently the best way is via fax or post

Funny you ask this, I remember actually having a discussion about doing this, but for another reason - to avoid users losing their messages because they lost their keys. We ended up not doing it of course, it makes no sense to have e2ee if you're going to bypass it anyway... If you need to be able to access the data I think you should probably force your users to not use e2ee rooms...

Honestly, chat is the equivalent of a person to person regular mouth to ear communication. Some stuff needs to be off record. Which effectively means, nothing in chat and not on a formal document is just coordination. Like it was for centuries.

Nachricht ist still the correct term and the verb would be "schreiben" (to write)

In a sentence: Ich schreibe dir später auf WhatsApp (I will text you on WhatsApp later)

Bundesnachrichtendienst unfortunately was already taken by some weird guys

Signal is (as far as I know) single-vendor, which they are confusingly calling “closed proprietary”

I guess it's a bit debatable. It's more or less open source - apparently there have been long periods when it was closed source (I think when they added cryptocurrency nonsense) and also it's centralised so you have to use their servers.

I would say it's a bit disingenuous to put it in the same list as Teams, Slack and WhatsApp though.

Element feels a lot like Slack/Teams/Discord. It has a few distinct features (federation and such), and a few are, as far as I'm aware, missing or "different enough" such as Slack's whole "We'll replace Email, why don't you write your longer documents in here as well"-thing.

Its indeed a brave new world. With governments getting ever more interested in what you do online, some not quite so mentally stable people have an audience for their mental diarrhea for the first time. If you ever asked yourself the famous "who is supposed to read that", well now somebody is payed to. I hope they do the nice thing and upvote

It certainly hasn't been w/o growing pains or detractors.

I still occasionally get rooms or spaces borked, and that frequency increases if E2EE is enabled.

The current server implementation is not svelte in the least, but that's a problem that's being solved with new server implementations that are already 90% of the way there (look-up Dendrite and Conduit if you haven't heard of them).

Signal and Threema are proprietary, in that the protocol they speak is vendor-specific and not openly standardised. You are literally locked to that system, and neither of them allow 3rd party clients to connect.

Moreover, Threema's server is closed-source and so completely proprietary - and you could argue that Signal's server is often closed-source too, given years occasionally go by without public code releases.

This is the rationale.

Signal clients may be open source, but as far as I know the network is very much closed and proprietary.

Correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I understand you can't make any changes to the Signal client, compile it yourself, and connect to the Signal network. You have to use the binaries from the app store.

Perhaps you could provide some initial arguments why they should?

[..]Real time collaboration systems such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, Mattermost, Wire, Threema, WhatsApp and Signal are currently all closed proprietary systems - meaning they are walled gardens whereby all parties have to use the same vendor. That’s impractical, creates vendor lock-in and stifles innovation. There’s simply no way that a government entity using, say, Microsoft Teams would be able to have secure real time communication with another government entity using, for example, Slack, Mattermost or Wire.[..]

I prefer cash and would at the same time use an encrypted messenger to communicate with the government.

While cards are certainly convenient, they have failed me at very inopportune moments. I’ve also recently witnessed how someone could not book a ticket for a ferry in one of the mostly cashless European states - cash wasn’t an option and they didn’t have a card. This was at the official counter at the harbor.

A few month ago, card terminals of a widely used type failed hard in Germany, only cash payment was possible.

Being able to do some purchases anonymously is also a good thing - even if it’s only my wife’s birthday present.

I prefer a society where cash is an option for all (in-person) transactions. And preserving that requires exercising the use of cash.

Encrypted secure communication with (and within) the government, or my medical provider is entirely orthogonal to that.

And for some things you still need to send a Fax... oh my!!! a FAX in 2022! Amuse yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz_amU-6EQI