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Estonia sues Gemalto for €152M over ID card flaws

181 points| atlasunshrugged | 7 years ago |reuters.com | reply

43 comments

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[+] amaccuish|7 years ago|reply
This provides some more information [0].

Not only did Gemalto fail to notify Estonia in good time about the ROCA flaw (the discoverers of which noticed that Estonia were still issuing vulnerable cards, so notified them themselves), some cards had their private keys generated outside of the card and then inserted, rather than on-card generation. I think Estonia is to be applaued here for handling all this in a sane manner.

[0] https://dan.enigmabridge.com/estonia-hits-gemalto-again-inse...

[+] amingilani|7 years ago|reply
They made everyone regenerate their private keys on the card recently during a short window, and those who missed it (like me) ended up with a fancy piece of paper with their name on it. Oh joy.

Just when I'd decided to use my e-Residency for something, it becomes worthless.

They're asking me to reapply for a new ID document and pay the fee all over again. I'd honestly do it, but then they can't hand it over to me in Pakistan and I'm not flying out of the country just to grab an e-Residency card when my previous one hasn't even expired yet.

I guess I'm still a bit sour over this.

[+] mb_72|7 years ago|reply
That 'short window' was some period of months, I thought. It's not cool the problem happened but sounds like you didn't consider it high enough priority to get onto it.
[+] Avamander|7 years ago|reply
I agree that they should reimburse because the flaw was not caused by you, but how did you manage to miss the massive publicity and uproar and not update your card?
[+] sccxy|7 years ago|reply
Problem was not security flaw.

Problem was that Gemalto did not tell Estonia that there is security flaw.

That led to rush security fix which could have been worked on for months before not do it in weeks.

[+] willsr|7 years ago|reply
I suppose the Estonians are partially at fault for trusting Gemalto with anything, post Snowden.
[+] dullgiulio|7 years ago|reply
Nothing to do with Snowden revelations, but with RSA prime number generation. Because of a bug on the chip, primes were generated starting from numbers divisble by ten, which are way rarer than those divisble by two (pardon the extreme simplification.)

That's a hardware design error. The claim is that Gemalto failed to fullfil the contractual clauses about quickly informing the customer (the Estonian state) of the security breach, not the existance of the security breach itself.

[+] Xylakant|7 years ago|reply
The article stipulates that the contract dates back until 2002, about 11 years before the Snowden allegations came to light. So while they could have switched afterwards, the contract may have had a longer contract period, locking them in for a while. You also can’t just switch the identity provider for your national ID system, such a move would need at least some lead time.
[+] y04nn|7 years ago|reply
Exactly, this crazy to think you can keep you sovereignty while giving to a foreign (French), NSA/CIA infiltrated (In-Q-Tel/Snowden) company the keys to all your citizens ID, moreover with internet voting. While ahead of its time, maximum caution must be taken, and the balance must be made between convenience and independence.
[+] pisipisipisi|7 years ago|reply
The problem is mandatory blind trust in single entity, be it Gemalto or Oberthur or NSA^H^HIST. Same issue with CA-s.
[+] TazeTSchnitzel|7 years ago|reply
Gemalto issues all of Sweden's forms of state ID right now, the NSA must be laughing.
[+] hkai|7 years ago|reply
Everyone told them you can't have secure electronic voting.
[+] Strom|7 years ago|reply
That's a statement that applies to everything, including classic paper voting. It's never a question of whether there's absolute security, because nothing has it. It's about comparing the security and other benefits of different systems.
[+] bozho|7 years ago|reply
And yet, they do have it ;)
[+] spuz|7 years ago|reply
The article doesn't mention voting. Not sure why it's relevant to Estonia's ID cards.
[+] thisisit|7 years ago|reply
This is surprising. Estonia was oft quoted example of digital governance. Any ideas on how this will effect their blockchain projects?
[+] ivoras|7 years ago|reply
Estonia had excellent digital governance before the blockchain fad so they'll handle it pretty much just fine.
[+] the_clarence|7 years ago|reply
How is this surprising? Or did you just want to mention cryptocurrencies?