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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

#51

Post by mrweasel »

azalemeth wrote: post #31

I'm a British expat with a Danish job. I really dislike MitID and the Danish centralised world of (very good) public services that come with it. Each person has a number, CPR, which effectively defines your life solely to the state. Visit a library, doctor, tax man, anything official, and your ID is recorded. Buy alcohol online, go grocery shopping, use your bank card -- and sign in with it. This undoubtedly makes th…

I would recommend getting the hardware dongle. I don't have the app, never did, and I've had none of the issues others have been complaining. The dongle is, generally, a much better experience from what I can tell, except if you need to do any authorizations on the go.

Your other complaints: 100% agree, the whole thing is a privacy nightmare.

I wouldn't count on a post mortem of any value. They still refuse to explain how the system has been abused in the past. Regardless of how hard I try, I fail to understand how it has been abused after QR codes was added to ensure presence at the device you're trying to authenticate at. The system feels secure, but has been abused a number of times and we're almost never told how.

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

#53

Post by ivan_gammel »

u1hcw9nx wrote: post #39
dijit wrote: 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…

Imagine someone "enthusiastically digitized" (as much as possible) in a foreign country alone and then they lose their iPhone Plane tickets, all hotel reservations, they don't remember any phone numbers. They use ApplePay and other mobile payments. Cards may be in the same wallet case. Without a trusted device or Recovery Key, Apple may impose a security delay (24 hours to several days) before allowing a password res…

Temporarily losing access is just inconvenience. Imagine the same but you lost the wallet with your only cash and your passport in pre-digital times, you are far from the nearest embassy and nobody understands your language. You are fully at the mercy of the locals and your money aren‘t coming back.

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

#54

Post by Ekaros »

jdmoreira wrote: post #22
lxgr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anything as high stakes as eID you need real-time revocation checks, which brings you back to at least some level of centralization.

Sure... but it should degrade to work when the central services are down. You should still be able to authenticate with each individual service when the centralised service is down. There is no reason why you shouldn't be able to login to your bank under these circumstances.

Finnish system works like that. If central system is down I can still log in to bank. But I can not log into say tax or healthcare system.

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

#55

Post by haltcatchfire »

Nekorosu wrote: post #44
azalemeth wrote: post #31

I'm a British expat with a Danish job. I really dislike MitID and the Danish centralised world of (very good) public services that come with it. Each person has a number, CPR, which effectively defines your life solely to the state. Visit a library, doctor, tax man, anything official, and your ID is recorded. Buy alcohol online, go grocery shopping, use your bank card -- and sign in with it. This undoubtedly makes th…

Interesting. Swedish BankID, that I'd guess serves the same purpose, works just fine on GrapheneOS, as well as nation wide payment system Swish.

It works just fine, but every time you open the app you have to dismiss a dialog saying that the app doesn't work without Google Play Services installed.

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

#57

Post by shantara »

azalemeth wrote: post #31

I'm a British expat with a Danish job. I really dislike MitID and the Danish centralised world of (very good) public services that come with it. Each person has a number, CPR, which effectively defines your life solely to the state. Visit a library, doctor, tax man, anything official, and your ID is recorded. Buy alcohol online, go grocery shopping, use your bank card -- and sign in with it. This undoubtedly makes th…

I have experienced the same privacy culture shock in Denmark. Generally, I think the people’s trust in their government is the greatest social asset of the danish society, as well as their biggest blind spot.

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

#58

Post by dijit »

azalemeth wrote: post #31

I'm a British expat with a Danish job. I really dislike MitID and the Danish centralised world of (very good) public services that come with it. Each person has a number, CPR, which effectively defines your life solely to the state. Visit a library, doctor, tax man, anything official, and your ID is recorded. Buy alcohol online, go grocery shopping, use your bank card -- and sign in with it. This undoubtedly makes th…

Also British, living across the bridge in Malmö, Sweden.

I really like the centralised system, it makes navigating society surprisingly easy when compared to say, Germany or the UK.

The difference is that I sort of trust the Swedish government, they've never really done anything to breach that trust - up to and including their handling of COVID (while controversial, they took the stance of individual liberty and a "collective responsibility" over mandatory top-down systems).

The UK in contrast has a much more heavy handed relationship with the population, up to and including incarcerating people for saying the phrase "we love bacon" at a construction site or typing the letter "n" on social media. It's a different context entirely.

Also, BankID, the central system is a definite weakness, but you can have a card/pin device that still works, and it does work on grapheneOS, though it will complain a bit if you don't have google services installed... which I find hilariously awful...

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

#59

Post by mrweasel »

zenmac wrote: post #6

Should have stuck with NemID a previous paper alternative or only offered MitID as a digital alternative. The rush to go all digital is coming back to bite them in the .....

One of the flaws of that system was exactly that you didn't know which domains where allowed to issue the requests for a one-time key.

Each service would serve the authenticator snippet from their own domain, with their own certificate. MitID, for all it's centralization flaws, solved that by only being valid under the mitid.dk domain. I doubt that most people check the domain and the certificate, but they could.

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

#60

Post by Gravityloss »

VorpalWay wrote: post #13
Gravityloss wrote: post #7

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.

As I understand it, BankID in Sweden is still run by one organisation co-owned by the big banks, and banks handle verification for issuance. There is still a single point of failure for the operation of the system.

Well I'm in Finland and seems the system here has multiple independent services and is thus potentially more resilient.
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