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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

#61

Post by phatfish »

mistrial9 wrote: post #38
mariusor wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

China is a democracy? That's news to me.

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

#62

Post by crote »

realusername wrote: post #7

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.

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.

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

#63

Post by crote »

lxgr wrote: post #52
realusername wrote: post #7

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.

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 purpos…

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.

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

#64

Post by lxgr »

realusername wrote: post #59
lxgr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 purpos…

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 general…

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.

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

#65

Post by pookha »

mariusor wrote: post #43
mistrial9 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 easi…

I don't have the knowledge of those volumes of political science and modern investigation systems where electronic identity can be applied to greater negative effect. That's why I was asking for more concrete examples instead of hand waving.

Really? Seems self evident to me...The entire point of binding an employee or user to a certificate, PIN and an x509 PKI system has always been for authorization and tracking. No hand waiving required. For instance, Militaries around the world use these cards to grant access to internal systems and to track and monitor the activities of the insiders within these sensitive systems. Seeing this creeping into the general public is creeptastic.

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

#66

Post by realusername »

lxgr wrote: post #64
realusername wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 general…

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 act…

> 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.

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

#67

Post by lxgr »

crote wrote: post #63
lxgr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 purpos…

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.

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.

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

#68

Post by ewi_ »

qweqwe14 wrote: post #46
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.

As adev_ mentioned, TLS implicitly requires a lot of things that can be considered expensive for very low power devices (dare I say "bloat"). Examples being things like X509 certificates. Another thing to consider is that TLS supports multiple use cases and has multiple versions, so it has stuff like algorithm negotiation, version negotiation and some other things that are really unnecessary when you just want a secu…

> What I'd like to see is a standardized protocol for this exact use case

Does Noise Protocol provide what you're looking for? http://www.noiseprotocol.org/

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

#69

Post by runeks »

qweqwe14 wrote: post #46
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.

As adev_ mentioned, TLS implicitly requires a lot of things that can be considered expensive for very low power devices (dare I say "bloat"). Examples being things like X509 certificates. Another thing to consider is that TLS supports multiple use cases and has multiple versions, so it has stuff like algorithm negotiation, version negotiation and some other things that are really unnecessary when you just want a secu…

I agree that runtime algorithm negotiation makes sense to avoid sometimes. So just make a spec that factors out the algorithm, and make the choice of algorithm a compile-time thing.

Then there's no need to hardcode anything in the spec, you can just say you're using the protocol RFC-12345-ChaCha20Poly1305 — with RFC-12345 being the spec that leaves out the algorithm.

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

#70

Post by lxgr »

realusername wrote: post #66
lxgr wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 act…

> 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 ti…

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...

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