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New German Government ID Hacked By CCC
wiedzmin writes "Public broadcaster ARD's show 'Plusminus' teamed up with the known hacker organization 'Chaos Computer Club' (CCC) to find out how secure the controversial new radio-frequency (RFID) chips were. The report shows how they used the basic new home scanners that will go along with the cards (for use with home computers to process the personal data for official government business) to demonstrate that scammers would have few problems extracting personal information. This includes two fingerprint scans and a new six-digit PIN meant to be used as a digital signature for official government business and beyond." That was quick. Earlier this year, CCC hackers demonstrated vulnerabilities in German airport IDs, too.
Sometimes I wonder why it isn't possible to declare/register a PGP public key as official, and use that to authentify oneself. I mean, with that even email can be secure. Oh well, too complicated for the "general public" I guess, I mean keeping a spare of your (digital) key? That's far too complicated!
No wit here.
Alle Ihre Pässe sind gehören uns
Yes, that is what you think it is: A corrupt translation of a corrupt translation.
1: fix the problems.
2: abandon the plan.
3: arrest the people who embarrassed you, suppress any mention of the incidents.
Hmmm... let's see...
THL phish sticks
Sometimes I wonder why it isn't possible to declare/register a PGP public key as official, and use that to authentify oneself. I mean, with that even email can be secure.
An imperfect systems can still be useful. If card/scanner misuse is on the order of handwritten signature misuse then replacing dead trees with some bits might be a good idea in many situations.
The pgp digital sig proves it was sent by your computer perhaps, but not necessarily sent by you. There is a genuine need for biometrics to be involved. Note that a handwritten signature is a form of biometric ID and like the card/scanner system it can be faked. This is why for more important situations a signature must be witnessed and possible notarized. The card/scanner system can similarly escalate the process for more important situation. For example when someone uses a bank's ATM a swipe and a pin are sufficient. When they walk up to a teller for larger transactions then a swipe and a pin could be augmented with a photo being displayed on the teller's screen. Banks often have such photos for embedding into ATM and credit cards.
When the hell are security "professionals" going to wake up and realize that secure access to something requires three items: identification, authentication and authorization. You CANNOT store the authentication credential with the identification. It is 100% stupid to store the pin on the identification device. Authentication credentials and authorization decisions must be kept by, and made by, the service provider. The only item that should be left with the consumer is an identification badge.
For instance, a national "ID Card" is actually a good thing IF the only thing it has stored on it or about it is the owners identification, i.e. name and unique ID number. The ONLY thing the card should provide is a way to contact a national database/server which requires two things, the unique, public ID number from the card and a fingerprint (which is NOT stored or printed on the card in any way). The ONLY information the server should return is "Yes" or "No". But see... the fingerprint cannot be stored on the card in way for the same reason that the pin in the post should never be stored on the card. If somebody other than the legitimate owner comes into possession of the card then he possesses both the identification AND the authentication pieces of the puzzle and can do whatever the legitimate owner was authorized to do.
Security: it's simple. f*cking learn it.
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
It's far safer than magnetic cards; I've heard no fraud cases where the PIN has been successfully extracted from the chip or the chip data cloned - reading the chip's contents would generally be far more expensive than the maximum money limits on the card. Mag-stripe cards can be cloned by a cafe waiter or a tiny 10$ device hidden on an ATM and then your money used in any place that "verifies" only signatures.
Also for the ID card - if it has some way to send the fingerprint data or encryption key outwards, then that is a design fuckup; but if it is only able to verify pin and sign message packets with the key if the pin is valid, and permanently erase the key if pin is entered wrongly a few times, then the security is quite adequate.