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Reversing 'France Identité': The New French Digital ID

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Re: Reversing 'France Identité': The New French Digital ID

#11
post #6
post #5

I wonder why do they need the whole secure channel thing instead of making the card hold a client certificate and use standard mutual TLS with their backend server.

I would not bet on it. But there is pretty low constraints on what you can do and can not with an NFC chip. Your budget in term of compute and memory is extremely low. I would be surprised a proper RSA/ECDSA signature from an X509 certificate can hold there. Very likely I would say no. And that's why the home made crypto.

Yeah - your compute budget is measured here in microjoules

Re: Reversing 'France Identité': The New French Digital ID

#12
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not bet on it. But there is pretty low constraints on what you can do and can not with an NFC chip. Your budget in term of compute and memory is extremely low. I would be surprised a proper RSA/ECDSA signature from an X509 certificate can hold there. Very likely I would say no. And that's why the home made crypto.

Why not do the same thing credit cards or access smartcards do? There are many electronic ID systems in EU already and none of them have homegrown crypto...

> Why not do the same thing credit cards or access smartcards do?

I think you would be surprised how bad the security on these systems is.

The credit card security relies mainly on the ability of the bank to rollback in case of "a shit happened" and in the payment terminal itself.

Probably not something you want to see to protect against identity thief nation wide. And you also can not trust individuals smartphone to do the right thing.

Re: Reversing 'France Identité': The New French Digital ID

#13

Does anyone know why a private govtech business like Palantir doesn’t take over all these use cases? Governments are notoriously bad at tech, why isn’t there a massive private corporation catering to all these use cases and ensuring state of the art security? Instead of hiring local clowns that release half baked solutions like this.

Palantir is a particularly bad example, it being american. France care a lot about sovereignty and would never allow (and for good reasons) an external entity to have that much control. It probably did ask for a contractor on an "appel d'offre" to build this so it's the same but with a french actor.

Re: Reversing 'France Identité': The New French Digital ID

#14

Does anyone know why a private govtech business like Palantir doesn’t take over all these use cases? Governments are notoriously bad at tech, why isn’t there a massive private corporation catering to all these use cases and ensuring state of the art security? Instead of hiring local clowns that release half baked solutions like this.

Look at the history of crypto AG

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-51487856

Re: Reversing 'France Identité': The New French Digital ID

#15

Does anyone know why a private govtech business like Palantir doesn’t take over all these use cases? Governments are notoriously bad at tech, why isn’t there a massive private corporation catering to all these use cases and ensuring state of the art security? Instead of hiring local clowns that release half baked solutions like this.

Because governments, like almost all entities, are beholden to budgets and accounting which incentivizes low spending. So you get lowest-bid contractors. On top of that, Europe (and especially France, IMO) isn’t real comfortable with foreign tech solutions at the moment.

Hence hiring the “local clowns”

Re: Reversing 'France Identité': The New French Digital ID

#16

Does anyone know why a private govtech business like Palantir doesn’t take over all these use cases? Governments are notoriously bad at tech, why isn’t there a massive private corporation catering to all these use cases and ensuring state of the art security? Instead of hiring local clowns that release half baked solutions like this.

Palantir is a particularly bad example, it being american. France care a lot about sovereignty and would never allow (and for good reasons) an external entity to have that much control. It probably did ask for a contractor on an "appel d'offre" to build this so it's the same but with a french actor.

We, French, do actually have seriously competent people in charge of central government IT infrastructure. Local governments not so much and that is an euphemism, but French central government doesn't cut corners about that. Also, ANSSI is among the world's best in security auditing and they take very diligently their public service role of sticking their noses into your information system if you are legally classified as an "Opérateur d'Importance Vitale".

Also, f*k Palantir. No one wants such vampire squids anywhere near the crown jewels.

Re: Reversing 'France Identité': The New French Digital ID

#17
post #6
post #5

I wonder why do they need the whole secure channel thing instead of making the card hold a client certificate and use standard mutual TLS with their backend server.

I would not bet on it. But there is pretty low constraints on what you can do and can not with an NFC chip. Your budget in term of compute and memory is extremely low. I would be surprised a proper RSA/ECDSA signature from an X509 certificate can hold there. Very likely I would say no. And that's why the home made crypto.

That's what is done in Brasil for dealing with their IRS (it's optional for physical persons, but mandatory for corporations) google for e-CPF and e-CNPJ (the brazilian tax IDs for people and corporations, respectively). The brazilian IRS started using digital certificates some 20 years ago, and specially for corporations it greatly improved the life of accountants.

Re: Reversing 'France Identité': The New French Digital ID

#18
post #6
post #5

I wonder why do they need the whole secure channel thing instead of making the card hold a client certificate and use standard mutual TLS with their backend server.

I would not bet on it. But there is pretty low constraints on what you can do and can not with an NFC chip. Your budget in term of compute and memory is extremely low. I would be surprised a proper RSA/ECDSA signature from an X509 certificate can hold there. Very likely I would say no. And that's why the home made crypto.

> Your budget in term of compute and memory is extremely low. I would be surprised a proper RSA/ECDSA signature from an X509 certificate can hold there.

The latest versions of the Java Card spec have VMs on them and have HTTP interfaces:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Card

There is nothing constrained about modern smart cards: it's just a matter of how much you want to spend on the card and its capabilities.

Re: Reversing 'France Identité': The New French Digital ID

#19

Does anyone know why a private govtech business like Palantir doesn’t take over all these use cases? Governments are notoriously bad at tech, why isn’t there a massive private corporation catering to all these use cases and ensuring state of the art security? Instead of hiring local clowns that release half baked solutions like this.

One company doing everything would just incite them to charge whatever they want at the taxpayer expenses, and do the bare minimum since there would be no competition to drive them out of business.

Re: Reversing 'France Identité': The New French Digital ID

#20
This is so good and important to show that these identity schemes are more about surveillance than security, as the security guarantees are limited and insufficient for any long period of time. An additional approach I might recommend for exploration would be to find the "offline mode," where it would have to re-use IVs and challenges over a short window when the app can't validate against the back end service. Other similar schemes I have seen implemented a single-use-key as a re-used limited-use-key to enable that use case.

The card he tested was apparently live in production, but one of the main vulnerabilities in protocols like these is in the 'personalization' stage of the setup, where each card gets a set of default 'provisioning keys,' which are used to register the card and get unique user keys for it. A sample of unpersonalized blanks would yield that, and the costs associated with mitigating this with batch specific keys for provisioning is typically too much complexity.

There may be a DoS vulnerability in some card schemes where you can use 'torn' NFC connections to get the key and transaction counter on the card applet to increment and desynchronize from the counter recorded on the server, bricking the card - or potentially many en masse with some SDR equipment.

Given the physical user enrollment costs, there are some basic impossibilities in these protocols that will always reduce their security to a set of trade-offs that depend on economics and obscurity. Security research like this acts as a check on the efficacy of totalitarian controls like digital id, and it is important work to continually demonstrate that there are risks and costs to the regimes that impose them. I am very grateful this researcher has done work to discredit this scheme.

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