Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reversing 'France Identité': The New French Digital ID

reversemode.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 90 posts

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

#31

Post by motohagiography »

mariusor wrote: post #26
motohagiography wrote: post #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…

Could you please expand how any of the findings, or any attempts at digital ID are about surveillance and totalitarianism? Your post, as it is now, is brandishing big and scary words based on flimsy assumptions and without any real backup.

I worked on digital identity schemes that used similar protocols to these a decade ago, and they were technologies in search of a use case because the vendors and project sponsors just wanted a mandate to implement controls nobody wanted. They're called domestic passports and a gesundheitpasses and the 20th century was defined by the regimes who implemented them. Identity and cryptography are areas where technologists cannot avoid moral culpability for their design and implementation decisions. This area is as real as it gets.

Those big scary words are technical terms of art in political science (defined by Arendt), and people who actually work in privacy and identity to ensure these technologies are not exploited by governments to abuse citizens, are engaged in the real work of governance. Part of that is demonstrating how even governments are bound by the laws of math and accountable to reason. I also understand how smaller words could be more broadly persuasive.

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

#32

Post by mongol »

Nextgrid wrote: 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.

Is anyone familiar with Microsoft Entra Verified Id? I only learned about it this week. Seem to be something along those lines.

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

#33

Post by uxp8u61q »

motohagiography wrote: post #31
mariusor wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please expand how any of the findings, or any attempts at digital ID are about surveillance and totalitarianism? Your post, as it is now, is brandishing big and scary words based on flimsy assumptions and without any real backup.

I worked on digital identity schemes that used similar protocols to these a decade ago, and they were technologies in search of a use case because the vendors and project sponsors just wanted a mandate to implement controls nobody wanted. They're called domestic passports and a gesundheitpasses and the 20th century was defined by the regimes who implemented them. Identity and cryptography are areas where technologist…

Still no explanations, and now you're belittling people who want an explanation and relying on your supposed authority on the matter.

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

#34

Post by mariusor »

motohagiography wrote: post #31
mariusor wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please expand how any of the findings, or any attempts at digital ID are about surveillance and totalitarianism? Your post, as it is now, is brandishing big and scary words based on flimsy assumptions and without any real backup.

I worked on digital identity schemes that used similar protocols to these a decade ago, and they were technologies in search of a use case because the vendors and project sponsors just wanted a mandate to implement controls nobody wanted. They're called domestic passports and a gesundheitpasses and the 20th century was defined by the regimes who implemented them. Identity and cryptography are areas where technologist…

Digital identity is the key for scaling democracy up, decreasing bureaucracy and integrating the act of being a citizen in day to day life, instead of being a chore that everyone complains about.

It could allow for abuse for sure, but what technology doesn't. Assuming bad faith ab-initio and using those exact "terms of art" give out very strong vibes of conspiracy theories and sovereign citizen fetishes.

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

#35

Post by lxgr »

adev_ wrote: post #22
throw0101a wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Smartcard and NFC are two different beast. The fashion for Smartcard is over, mainly due to the necessity of specialized reader. The wind blows in favor of NFC cards & badge because they are smartphone compatible. But these comes with limitations.

Not at all: NFC (or more accurately ISO 14443) is often used as just another interface for regular ISO 7816 smartcards.

There are other contactless standards (storage only, proprietary fixed-function logic etc.) too, but full-fledged Java Card smartcards are actually quite common: It’s what most contactless payment cards are.

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

#36

Post by LunaSea »

GaelFG wrote: post #24
louison11 wrote: post #10

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.

In fact they do. Barely any development FOR the french government is done internally, all is externalized to "specialized" extern private companies (a known exemple Cap Gemini). I wouldn't call them clowns, and they do have competent people but they totally do focus more on public money extraction than on quality, like nearly all monopoly position companies. Results are sometime good sometime not.

Calling them clowns would be an insult to clowns.

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

#37

Post by mistrial9 »

mariusor wrote: post #26
motohagiography wrote: post #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…

Could you please expand how any of the findings, or any attempts at digital ID are about surveillance and totalitarianism? Your post, as it is now, is brandishing big and scary words based on flimsy assumptions and without any real backup.

> flimsy assumptions and without any real backup

saying this does not make it true -- volumes of political science are written on the topic of public identity. The perfect world where every instrument is applied fairly and in no other way, does not exist. A quick knowledge of modern investigation systems by law and tax authorities will be evidence of the alternate uses of this tech. Details on these topics could easily fill a book.

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

#38

Post by mistrial9 »

mariusor wrote: post #34
motohagiography wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on digital identity schemes that used similar protocols to these a decade ago, and they were technologies in search of a use case because the vendors and project sponsors just wanted a mandate to implement controls nobody wanted. They're called domestic passports and a gesundheitpasses and the 20th century was defined by the regimes who implemented them. Identity and cryptography are areas where technologist…

Digital identity is the key for scaling democracy up, decreasing bureaucracy and integrating the act of being a citizen in day to day life, instead of being a chore that everyone complains about. It could allow for abuse for sure, but what technology doesn't. Assuming bad faith ab-initio and using those exact "terms of art" give out very strong vibes of conspiracy theories and sovereign citizen fetishes.

> Digital identity is the key for scaling democracy up

unintended consequences are the topic at hand right? In all the world's countries, which shows "democracy scaling up" ? The single largest country is called China, they use Digital ID for scaling.

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

#39

Post by lxgr »

adev_ wrote: post #6
Nextgrid wrote: 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.

Smartcards, including the contactless kind (often called NFC, but that’s technically a related but different set of standards), have been able to perform RSA signatures since the 90s.

A secure channel between a backend holding the keys (usually in an HSM) and a card read by a mobile device is pretty standard, actually. That's how remote card top-up usually works.

The relevant smartcard standards (ISO 7816 or GlobalPlatform, I can't remember) provide that type of secure channel protocol by default.

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

#40

Post by michaelt »

Nextgrid wrote: 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 believe they are hoping to make a system which adds some sophisticated capabilities - for example:

* Can't read any identity information from the card contactlessly without a PIN, so you need somewhere to enter the PIN.

* Ability to prove your age without disclosing your identity, so you need somewhere to choose how much info to share.

* To validate ID cards for people whose phones are dead, the ability do to the above securely even on a sketchy nightclub bouncer's phone.

* Making all this stuff accessible on normal people's phones, not some $$$$ dedicated reader hardware.

* Ability to provably give another person permission to collect a parcel for you (I can only assume French parcel services are a lot more fastidious than ones in my country) with four-way coordination between the two people, the parcel service and the government.

Between these factors, I assume they want the mobile app itself to also be pretty heavily locked down so that even if that nightclub bouncer wanted his phone to record your PIN or whatever it wouldn't work.

And no doubt it's also crossed some people's minds that if there was ever another pandemic, creating a sudden need for a new vaccine passport, it sure would be convenient to have an extensible national ID system....

Post reply on HN