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Tell HN: MitID, Denmark's digital ID, was down

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Re: Tell HN: MitID, Denmark's digital ID, was down

#61
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NemID, the previous national 2-factor solution, used a small card with rows of pre-printed single-use codes. When you logged in to a bank or a public sector website, it would ask for a random code at a specific row and column number. Once the system registered that you had just a handful of codes left, a new card would be sent to you via snailmail. It worked fine for the time. The current system, MitID, depends on sm…

The big drawback of one time passwords is that it doesn't protect against man-in-the-middle attacks such as phishing, which is in practice one of the most common attacks on systems of this scale. The logistics operation involved in distributing codes is also very expensive and inflexible. You may need to authenticate payments a dozen times in an hour one day, when you are on a farmers market which doesn't take card p…

> The big drawback of one time passwords is that it doesn't protect against man-in-the-middle attacks such as phishing, which is in practice one of the most common attacks on systems of this scale.

This is true and was definitely a criticism of the old system, where websites would open the NemID iframe and ask you for your username, password and a specific indexed OTP code, without providing any authentication to you. You only notice something weird if it asks you for an the index of a code that is not on your card but maybe the scammer is lucky and guesses an index that you have and then they can use that phished username/password/OTP triple to perform an unauthorized action.

The new system is slightly different, because if you use the mobile phone authentication it will send you a notification to your phone, but if you use the (bespoke, non-standard) OTP dongle it still does not authenticate itself towards the user. However the codes are now time-based so if they collect an OTP code they can only use it in a ~30s window, so the phished credentials have to be used immediately.

Re: Tell HN: MitID, Denmark's digital ID, was down

#62
post #17

Terrifying to live in a digital economy when something like this happens. You're usually about 1 service away from realising that the "money you have" is just an int32, that, if everything works properly, you can modify. Otherwise you have nothing except a pretty little plastic card. (I'm aware that payments systems are not affected, but it's a sobering realisation that I've had a couple of times, but it works enough…

> the "money you have" is just an int32 If only it was a uint32

My money is a boolean at this point.

    money_in_account=false;

Re: Tell HN: MitID, Denmark's digital ID, was down

#64

this is not big news in dk, it will be up again soon - i dont know of any mitid services that are life-or-death enough to have people panicing about an hours downtime

>this is not big news in dk Yep let's not learn from that incident and wait until is offline for like 2 weeks, and be assured that will happen.

yeah, everyone knows every European website is eventually down for 2 weeks. only the FAANG know how to keep websites up.

Re: Tell HN: MitID, Denmark's digital ID, was down

#67

Don't banks have their own id:s as well? At least in another nordic country, you have quite many login possibilities to many services. Banks even provide cross-login.

No. As I understand it the previous system, NemID was actually (co?)designed by the banks so this is what they all use. Likewise MitID is another unholy alliance of Nets (a Danish payment provider) and Danish banks. Given the Swedish version of it is called BankID I assume the situation is nearly the same in Sweden.

Sweden have one other viable alternative that is Freja ID, it does not have at all the coverage as BankID but it's something.

Re: Tell HN: MitID, Denmark's digital ID, was down

#69
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>this is not big news in dk Yep let's not learn from that incident and wait until is offline for like 2 weeks, and be assured that will happen.

yeah, everyone knows every European website is eventually down for 2 weeks. only the FAANG know how to keep websites up.

>only the FAANG know how to keep websites up

Really FAANG can stop a solar-storm? A war on infrastructure?

Remember that your website not just needs running computers but energy too, and a net that brings that information to the peoples, and those peoples devices need power too.

Just look at the Berlin outage where people had to go to hotpots with generators to load the phone:

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/07/europe/berlin-power-outag...

And that was a small attack on infra but 100'000 where affected.

But sorry if i touched any of your sensitive areas...because it's Europe and not FAANG ;)

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