The new cards issued in 2018 are not known to have any vulnerabilities.
[0]: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/timeline-estonian-id-card-vul...
I somewhat disagree, the discussion tends to get bent by some populist agent provocateurs and some of the initial reactions from the private sector media. (In Estonia, the government media is the most centered out of all news outlets, go figure). What these statements usually are is that "ID card has a flaw X, therefore we should immidiately ban it, close the R&D and burn it with fire", forgetting that crypto and computing in general, changes over time. My view is that, of course each flaw has to be resolved and sometimes this is political, but this just means the work has to continue.
If you put it into business terms, would you trust an employee or vendor who told you that everything was alright, did not allow you to perform checks and audits and mocked both your and external partners concerns [0] about it? I don't think so. If the government is indeed for the people and not vice versa, then this is not acceptable.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs Tom Scott's video about e-voting. Funniest rebuttal I saw on Estonian social media was that we are secure, since he is talking about e-voting, but we have i-voting. So I guess once we will call it c-voting, it will be even better...?
Elsewhere, "Papers, please" tends to be sign of excessive "stop-and-frisk" or movement restrictions, and the idea of having basic ID card seems to not have much of an opposition. Especially since it's much simpler than sometimes circular requirements of "web of trust" confirmations like in UK (though I heard it got better)
If my memory serves me right, there was an easy way to check if your ID card was affected and it got replaced for free. The flaws described in paper are not known to exist in cards issued since the end of 2018, beginning of 2019.
ROCA didn't just affect Estonian ID cards, though. It also affected also TPMs (from Infineon), certain Yubikeys [4], and even some PGP keys!
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[0]: https://github.com/crocs-muni/roca
[1]: https://roca.crocs.fi.muni.cz/
[2]: https://keychest.net/roca/
[3]: http://www.id.ee/?lang=en&id=38239
[4]: https://www.yubico.com/support/security-advisories/ysa-2017-...
None of this is to say that the system doesn't have flaws, as every other IT system, it does. It is however publicly discussed as you would expect in a democracy.
[0] https://www.mkm.ee/sites/default/files/e-valimiste_tooruhma_...
[1] https://www.err.ee/keyword/15389
[2] https://www.postimees.ee/term/15008/id-kaart
[3] https://www.valitsus.ee/et/peaminister-ministrid/valitsuse-k...
Can you please clarify the 'fairly regularly' part? One of the members of that commission said that this is the first time that this kind of audit has been undertaken: https://digi.geenius.ee/rubriik/uudis/e-valimiste-tooruhma-l... To be fair, there are lots of other reviews having taken place, but none of them are regular with the exception of the OECD ones happening during elections: https://et.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektrooniline_h%C3%A4%C3%A4le...
> There is also frequent news coverage, both supporting and criticizing the system
ERR is government-funded and seems to me quite neutral, not sure how it is relevant here. But it still seems to me that mainstream media is supportive and you have to go to "alternative" news sources to find any true criticism.
> One of the current government parties [3] is an active critic of the system.
Actually 2, if you count both KE and EKRE. And this is one of the major criticisms against those parties and has been so for years.
A good example of the prevailing attitude can be seen in this thread from 2017 about the security hole back then from Hinnavaatlus, probably biggest IT-related forum in Estonia: https://foorum.hinnavaatlus.ee/viewtopic.php?t=715076&postda... The general tonality in the beginning was that this is a tinfoil problem and somehow brought up by KE and EKRE before elections until the reality of the situation sunk in.
Funny, it's called "cucumber time" (agurketid) in Danish. I wonder if it's a related term in Nordic countries + Estonia.
I've never heard any similar expression in English, nor in any Romance languages. The Brits use "silly season" for the same concept in journalism/news.
Anyone else in a similar situation has any recommendations or ideas about this?
Jesus that sounds terrible...
See my older comment [1] for some related topcis to research.
Like accidentally on purpose,secure up to a point, but weak enough to allow the spooks to generate their own IDs. I mean if the cards were unhackable how would a spy do his job :]
1) Obviously, a government-issued photo ID
2) For an increasing number of shops, as your “frequent shopper” card, which admittedly is slightly related to...
3) Authentication, including: logging into your bank, government websites (the state portal, the tax authority, the the “digital story” - all your medical records, the online booking website for booking some combination of surgeons/specialists that operate under the public healthcare system), the (one) online pharmacy that exists, etc.
4) Signing things. I’ve signed my lease with it (though “paperless” Estonia still wanted me to sign a paper version as well) and more routinely you have to “digitally sign” any bank transfers... which are the standard way to pay bills in Estonia, so you do it a lot. Finally, voting online.
I don’t see how broadly compromising the crypto would really benefit anyone for any of those things, it would have to be a more specific individual attack, like draining your bank accounts.
Edit: formatting, added voting
Paper signatures and fax are both considered obsolete, the latter is basically never used. Cheques? Never seen them. Logging into any high-value service is done using the eID. If you use local services there's rarely any need for any site specific passwords, password managers, U2F, FIDO(2), GPG or similar identity technology. There's no need to send a pic of yourself to verify your identity anywhere, zero shit like that.
You know how PayPal, Stripe or similar payment processors felt/feel really cool and fast? Yeah, we barely felt that because banklinks have fulfilled that use case for the majority for a really long time now.
There aren't any other examples on the top of my head right now, but they're really not the only things. By now, there's basically an entire generation in Estonia that literally have zero idea how things were before, and are thus often shocked by what and how much is required from them in other countries.
> Are there companies like Jumio and Acuant in Estonia, or has the government rendered them pointless?
They're basically nonexistent.
Feel free to reach out, my email is fabian (at) flapplabs.se
