[HN Gopher] Tell HN: MitID, Denmark's digital ID, was down
___________________________________________________________________
Tell HN: MitID, Denmark's digital ID, was down
MitID is the sole digital ID provider, leading the entire country
unable to log into their internet banking, public services, digital
mail etc. https://www.digitaliser.dk/mitid/nyt-fra-
mitid/2026/feb/drif...
Author : mousepad12
Score : 113 points
Date : 2026-02-27 10:52 UTC (12 hours ago)
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| I guess that's the one thing you don't want to be down and yet
| it's down..
| plaguna wrote:
| First, we saw Russian hacking campaigns in Ukraine before the
| invasion of the country. [1][2]
|
| Are we seeing the same in Denmark/Greenland with the USA?
|
| [1]
| https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2022/7335...
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Ukraine_cyberattacks
| ta9000 wrote:
| Tin foil is aisle ten friend.
| 5o1ecist wrote:
| This is a completely mindless, canned reaction.
|
| Too many people appear to be lacking the ability to grasp
| that, if they hadn't spent decades reacting like mindless,
| programmed bots to anything that might require more than two
| braincells to think about, most of the things revealed by the
| EpStein files would have surfaced a lot sooner.
|
| And that's just the tip of the ice berg.
| celpgoescheeew wrote:
| given the very sparse info on the actual problem i find it
| suspicious as well.
| zenmac wrote:
| 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 .....
| lxgr wrote:
| How would you use a paper ID online? (Securely, i.e. not the
| insane thing of taking a selfie holding it or something
| similarly bizarre in an age of powerful GenAI.)
| simongray wrote:
| 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 smartphones, though you
| can get an an external key generator as a backup too.
| LeonidasXIV wrote:
| Yeah but functionally it is the same. If the website is
| down it doesn't matter if I got the OTP code from a piece
| of paper or the dongle.
| xorcist wrote:
| 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
| payments or you are out dining with friends, and another
| day not at all.
|
| Given all this, a good old public key infrastructure makes
| sense. But that is unfortunately also usually the first
| step to a complexity explosion.
| LeonidasXIV wrote:
| > 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.
| timoth wrote:
| > 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 payments or you are out dining with
| friends, and another day not at all.
|
| It's very unlikely people would need to mess about with
| MittId/BankID if they can't use card payments at a
| market. Firstly, if they're doing the almost-unheard-of
| clunky approach of using their mobile banking app to make
| a bank transfer, it would probably be authorised using
| their touch/face ID instead of BankID/MittID. But _far_
| more likely, they 'd use one of the ubiquitous mobile
| payment apps: Vipps (Norway), Swish (Sweden) or MobilePay
| (Denmark).
| optionalsquid wrote:
| > 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
| payments or you are out dining with friends, and another
| day not at all.
|
| Neither of the scenarios you describe would require you
| to authenticate using MitID: Peer-to-peer payments in
| Denmark are typically done using the app MobilePay, which
| only requires MitID authentication during setup. And you
| never need MitID authentication when paying in person, at
| most you'll need your card's pin-code
| LeonidasXIV wrote:
| The way it worked before was that you had basically a piece
| of paper with OTP codes and the website would prompt you for
| a very specific one.
|
| How that would've prevented this issue: not at all. If the
| login service is down, having the piece of paper with OTP
| codes is worthless as the problem is not getting the codes (I
| can still get MitID codes with the OTP dongle) but the
| authentication website. The previous system was just as
| centralized.
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| 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.
| VorpalWay wrote:
| 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.
| elygre wrote:
| Same in Norway.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Well I'm in Finland and seems the system here has multiple
| independent services and is thus potentially more resilient.
| Anonyneko wrote:
| I was under the impression that all of those services and
| login methods rely on suomi.fi in the end, but I admit that
| I don't understand the system terribly well.
| wasmitnetzen wrote:
| There is technically a second provider, Freja, but that is
| basically only supported by government agencies, and even
| that is spotty.
|
| There are talks about a state-provided one coming soon,
| because of EU E-ID laws.
| mousepad12 wrote:
| No. Many/most of them support login through hardware ID on your
| smartphone (i.e fingerprint/TPM-style pin), but the actual
| authorization of transfers or any privileged access is entirely
| MitID
| LeonidasXIV wrote:
| 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.
| mingusrude wrote:
| Sweden have one other viable alternative that is Freja ID, it
| does not have at all the coverage as BankID but it's
| something.
| erk__ wrote:
| Another one just popped up recently though it does not have
| a lot of coverage if anywhere yet:
| https://corporate.e-boks.com/loesninger/e-wallet/e-boks-id/
| VorpalWay wrote:
| The Swedish BankID has the same potential weak point. Any
| centralised system does.
|
| The way TLS on the Web works is better: as long as the CA is up
| some time during the period I need to renew it is fine. Digital
| IDs should really work that way (probably with relatively short
| life spans just like let's encrypt: the digital ID could need to
| be renewed once a week for example, and it would opportunisticly
| renew when less than half the time is left).
| lxgr wrote:
| For anything as high stakes as eID you need real-time
| revocation checks, which brings you back to at least some level
| of centralization.
| progbits wrote:
| Revocation lists can be distributed.
| lxgr wrote:
| Yes, but they still originate somewhere, and if that source
| goes offline, you're still at risk of accepting stolen
| credentials.
| VorpalWay wrote:
| Yes, but under the assumption that downtime is typically
| short (a few hours), that small risk seems better than a
| foreign nation state actor being able to block essential
| services like identifying with healthcare, or sending
| transactions.
| jdmoreira wrote:
| 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.
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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.
| j16sdiz wrote:
| I don't understand. We don't have real time revocation for
| passports, do we?
|
| In fact, we don't have real time revocation of any document
| until very recently...
| zirror wrote:
| don't we? We call somewhere and revoke the Passport,
| atleast in Germany.
| lxgr wrote:
| But does that propagate to every entity worldwide using
| passports for identification, including all non-
| government-affiliated companies and KYC providers?
| Muromec wrote:
| That's very true for a lot of PKI systems too. The
| revocation lists are published, but nobody is reading
| them.
| lxgr wrote:
| At least they exist. I've tried looking into this in the
| past, and I haven't really found any public passport
| revocation list, even of just numbers (i.e. without
| disclosing associated names or any other sensitive data).
| xorcist wrote:
| We do. There are centralized databases of passport serial
| number, for blacklisting (revocation) or just persons of
| interest.
| lxgr wrote:
| For all countries? I was always wondering about that when
| doing one of these wonderful "take a selfie of you
| holding your passport" "authentication" procedures...
| SkiFire13 wrote:
| Italy's digital ID (SPID) works by having multiple trusted
| providers that can attest your identity. You can sign up with
| multiple of them, and if one is not available you could use
| another one. Not perfect (it's still centralized in the hand of
| 10-20 providers) but better than nothing. Unfortunately most
| people only ever signed up with one provider, and the
| government is now pushing for a more centralized digital ID
| istead (CieID).
| vidarh wrote:
| All of these IDs in the EEA are based on a common set of EU
| requirements, and in theory that means multiple providers,
| but in practice in many countries the set of providers is
| small and with feature gaps. E.g. Norway has several
| providers, but they provide different levels of security and
| features, which means in practice most people rely on
| BankID...
|
| 10-20 is fantastic in comparison. Even if people don't have
| more than one it at least reduces the blast radius..
| designerarvid wrote:
| BankID is not government backed, and most governmental agencies
| have alternatives to BankID as well.
| repelsteeltje wrote:
| Agreed, there should not be a tight (temporal) couple.
|
| But it's a trade off. Long-lived TLS certificates have always
| had the cert revocation problem. OCSP stapling never took off,
| so in the end the consensus seems to have been to decrease
| expiry date. (Mostly fueled by Let's Encrypt / ACME).
|
| Relying on expiration rather than explicit revocation of course
| also assumes (somewhat) accurately synchronized clocks which is
| never trivial in distributed systems. In practice it put's
| pressure on NTP, which itself is susceptible to all kinds of
| hairy security issue.
|
| I like to think of the temporal aspect as a fail-open / fail-
| close balance. These centralized solutions favour the former,
| and that's why we see this resulting outage.
| bjarteaarmolund wrote:
| Supposedly up again now
| jdmoreira wrote:
| These things should be offline / resilient first right?
|
| Smartcards / YubiKeys.
|
| Never understood the logic for these to be centralised / online.
| consp wrote:
| Revocation.
| jdmoreira wrote:
| can be solved with a hybrid model that degrades when the
| central service is down. No?
| erk__ wrote:
| Well they provide that if you want. they have both a OTP
| dongle, a OTP loud speaker and one that uses FIDO U2F
| (though you need to pay for that one).
|
| https://www.mitid.dk/en-gb/get-started-with-mitid/how-to-
| use...
| xorcist wrote:
| PKI works offline until you realize you need to handle
| revocations.
|
| For this and related reasons, such as enforcing protocol
| upgrades, most smartcard systems end up permanently online.
| VorpalWay wrote:
| You can have a mixed system, such that revocation lists are
| downloaded and cached every hour or so, and you can even try
| to check online more often than that, but fall back to the
| downloaded lists if the system is down.
| mollerhoj wrote:
| 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
| BSDobelix wrote:
| >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.
| avh02 wrote:
| yeah, everyone knows every European website is eventually
| down for 2 weeks. only the FAANG know how to keep websites
| up.
| BSDobelix wrote:
| >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 ;)
| avh02 wrote:
| nah, i generally agree with you on single points of
| failure, i just don't agree that it would go on as long
| as 2 weeks. 24-48 hours i can believe, but at the
| absolute worst case I'd also expect anyone with minimal
| competence to have a plan to spin things up from the
| latest offsite backup somewhere else. (minimal competence
| is a big statement though). Even redundant setups can go
| down altogether from a fatfinger or automation gone wrong
| (see almost any outage from FAANG)
|
| > stop a solar-storm
|
| never heard of those taking out a data center, but i'm
| not highly educated on that one.
|
| > A war on infrastructure
|
| government datacenter will be first in line for fuel,
| generators, etc. A destroyed gov. datacenter would be the
| start of much more serious things to worry about.
|
| > Just look at the Berlin outage where people had to go
| to hotpots
|
| yeah, this one _is_ a little embarassing, but people who
| have to go to hotspots != datacenters
|
| The original statement stands.
| BSDobelix wrote:
| > hotspots != datacenters
|
| A running data-center without a net or consumers is
| nothing worth.
|
| >The original statement stands.
|
| Well true, the Website runs but no one can access it.
| mousepad12 wrote:
| This is a tech site, not a news site. Threads posted here are
| rarely if ever "big news" nor is that the point.
|
| The topic is an opener to discuss MitID, electronic ID's in
| general, the protocols behind them, what happens when they
| fail, privacy, societies reliance on them or something similar.
| dijit wrote:
| 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_ of the time that I forget about it... it 's a bit
| like the meme about backups where a computer takes too long to
| boot, the person slowly builds panic and starts wishing they had
| backed up and published all their important work - then when the
| computer works they say "*phew*, thank god I don't have to do any
| of _that_ ".
| davidguetta wrote:
| Now go read about fractional reserve banking
| sinnsro wrote:
| Now that the money is gone
|
| What are we supposed to do?
|
| After all that we've been through
|
| When everything that felt so right is wrong
|
| Now that the money is gone (money is gone)
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| Witnessing this or Texas floods, politicians in my country dare
| to say that `We don't need cash'
| u1hcw9nx wrote:
| 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 reset. Getting new SIM and re-authenticating our life
| will be pain.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| 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.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| A wallet is a wonderful invention that allows you to lose
| all your important items in one fell swoop
| M95D wrote:
| I keep ID+money separate from passport+cards.
| u1hcw9nx wrote:
| With Digital passports and ID's the route to recovery
| starts to get hairy.
|
| 1. You need to verify yourself in person to get id or
| passport. You may need someone you know with you and have
| real interview.
|
| 3. But government gives only digital ID's so you need a
| phone to get it.
|
| 4. You can't buy a new phone or get a new SIM unless you
| can pay for it. You can't pay for it unless you have a
| phone and credit cards there. But neither bank does not
| recognize you without digital ID.
|
| You need friends to bootstrap your life, but you are also
| in the middle of loneliness epidemic and have no friends,
| you parents have died. What do you do?
| lxgr wrote:
| It's probably not a great idea to depend on friends or
| family to remotely bootstrap you out of a situation like
| that anyway, given deepfake impersonation scams.
| Muromec wrote:
| For that kind of a thing you usually have to be present,
| for which deepfakes are not a threat yet.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| Does any government in the world issue only digital IDs?
|
| There's always possibility to have your travel passport
| as a backup (and when traveling abroad your domestic ID
| is suitable for recovering passport).
| u1hcw9nx wrote:
| Not yet. Soon.
| Muromec wrote:
| Any governments announced the plans already? I somehow
| missed that, but you say it like it's a decided thing.
| niels8472 wrote:
| Considering the actual physical id cards have an nfc chip
| which is used as the second factor for the digital id,
| this seems unlikely.
| Muromec wrote:
| You are overthinking it. The physical cards to pay and
| identify yourself are not going anywhere. In fact, the
| same places that have the digital id rolled out are the
| places where having one issued is mandatory and often
| times it's also mandatory to have one in case the police
| asks you to identify yourself.
|
| When I wanted to get a replacement id to be issued in the
| year 2019, I had to book an appointment, get to the place
| and by the time I got the desk, the clerk had the thing
| open with my face photo from the last time I had a
| passport issued.
|
| There are less fortunate people, who have the hardcopy id
| present, but no digital file exists for it (because it
| was issued before the digital files became a thing) and
| the paper trail leads to the occupied territory. That is
| usually months long story where secondary sources are
| involved and sometimes you have to find a friend who can
| confirm your identity.
|
| So yeah. Make sure that the issuing CA doesn't get
| overrun by orcs before the replica thinks and you a
| hardcopy that is trustworthy enough.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I just have one paper passport, the only passport that will
| be accepted abroad.
| lxgr wrote:
| What's the difference to losing your backpack containing all
| these separate items? And conversely, it's very possible to
| carry a recovery Yubikey, a single-use login code etc. in a
| separate bag.
|
| Getting a new (e)SIM abroad can be very annoying, depending
| on the mobile network, which is why I try to avoid mandatory
| SMS authentication as much as possible.
| ab71e5 wrote:
| Yeah losing is maybe a bad example. What about a software
| update bricking the device, or a hardware problem?
| nicoburns wrote:
| > the "money you have" is just an int32
|
| If only it was a uint32
| doublerabbit wrote:
| My money is a boolean at this point.
| money_in_account=false;
| M95D wrote:
| Still better than half of uint32 possibilities.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Wanna take another stab at that? :)
| M95D wrote:
| Lol, I just wrote a bug.
| chii wrote:
| > that the "money you have" is just an int32
|
| well, luckily, that's not how money is stored, but instead,
| they're transaction based. Aka, that number you have is a
| calculated value, not a stored, arbitrary value.
|
| Except...perhaps the central bank's, where they could really
| just generate that money as an arbitrary value to lend out to
| other banks.
|
| footnote: of course, your account balance is cached, so that it
| is not recalculated over and over again...
| TonyStr wrote:
| Do you know of any resources where I can read about how banks
| store digital currency? Would be interesting to see how
| international transactions are handled, if they chunk data
| into months/periods, etc.
| filcuk wrote:
| I can't say this is exactly what you're after, but this
| article is really interesting https://calpaterson.com/bank-
| python.html
|
| Similar to what the author describes, I wouldn't be
| surprised if a lot of this information is generally not
| public.
| delusional wrote:
| I'm a banker. What you're looking for here is called
| "interbank clearing". In europe that would be SEPA[1]
|
| But yes, most clearing is done daily. Each bank basically
| submits their daily flow of money to each other
| participating bank, and the central ACH (Automated Clearing
| House) keeps track of the balances. There's some processes
| in there by which banks can dispute charges, which is super
| interesting, but also way to complicated for me to detail
| here.
|
| [1]: https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/epc-
| paymen...
| joha4270 wrote:
| Alas, no matter how the bits that makes up my bank balance
| looks, in practice its still a single point of failure where
| I might simply lose access to my money if the right service
| is down. Cash has much better uptime stats, even if it can be
| inconvenient to carry around.
| have_faith wrote:
| Regular banks create new money all the time (loans). There's
| no difference to the central bank conceptually as far as I
| understand, they both record debits/credits to accounts
| (double entry).
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Ah yes, who needs the Federal Reserve when you have Kansas'
| own Emprise Bank.
| lxgr wrote:
| Seems like a distinction without difference in this context.
| The result of the "what is account x's current/available
| balance" is still some integer or decimal number.
| chii wrote:
| But the GP implied that the bank (or someone) could just
| alter that number, and it would become reality.
|
| I'm saying that this can't be done - at least, not without
| leaving such a large trail behind that it would be easily
| reverted, and relevant people prosecuted.
| delusional wrote:
| > well, luckily, that's not how money is stored, but instead,
| they're transaction based.
|
| Not really. That's how the accounting works. It's the gold
| standard, and what we guarantee our customers, it's not
| universally how we store it though. Plenty of bank systems
| store just singular balances and infer that back into
| "transactions" in other systems to make the balance even out.
| Then the errors in those balances are manually corrected by
| looking at the sums.
|
| IT systems only rarely match the legal frameworks they
| operate within.
| eesmith wrote:
| "just an int32"
|
| I remember hearing that Zimbabwe, during its period of
| hyperinflation, had problems because the databases for the
| banking system couldn't handle a time with $100 trillion
| banknotes, and ATMs didn't work because of overflow errors.
|
| If only they had used int128. :)
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Given reliability and security of payment systems - simple
| credit card (chip/nfc) should be enough for identity. You could
| pull off entire election using payment terminals.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Is it in anyway worse when the money you had was some strips of
| paper, or metal coins, or goats, or salt?
|
| All of those have some very annoying fail scenarios too.
| dijit wrote:
| yeah, it's worse.
|
| Someone trips over a cable and now your region of the world
| can't recognise that you have any wealth of any kind.
|
| Or, you can get debanked by the state. :)
|
| Hard to do that with coinage- but you can have your coinage
| destroyed in a fire (or via theft, of course).
| surgical_fire wrote:
| I respectfully disagree, but each with their own personal
| annoyances.
|
| Strips of paper and metal coins have a huge problem with
| forgery. Metal coins in particular can get very heavy very
| quickly.
|
| Goats have this issue that they can get sick and die. They
| also need to be fed. Goats have a massive advantage that
| while heavy, they can move around on their own. Not easily
| fractionable though.
|
| Salt is probably the best one in that list. Easily
| fractionable, not easy to forge. Can be used as seasoning
| and to dry things. It can get wet though.
| dijit wrote:
| You can disagree, that's fine.
|
| But anything you can touch has the risk of being forged
| or destroyed.
|
| The whole point of bank notes was that they're centrally
| backed- someone would take the responsibility of ensuring
| that it's hard to forge and backed by something "real".
|
| But centralising it so completely has pretty concrete
| drawbacks, which is fine, if your infrastructure is
| perfectly reliable and your banks are trustworthy.
|
| History has shown us that infrastructure is never
| perfect, and banks are not perfectly trustworthy. So,
| hedge your own risks.
|
| A personal tragedy (losing some money) is materially
| different than the entire economy being screwed because
| of a programming issue, or a city being screwed because
| of an internet outage, or a person and their family being
| (additionally) screwed because they offended a
| politician.
|
| It's just.. different levels, and the centralised
| convenience becomes a pretty catastrophic impact in the
| worst case; and on a long enough timeline, the worst case
| is inevitable.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| I still disagree. I personally welcome the move to less
| physical money.
|
| > A personal tragedy (losing some money) is materially
| different than the entire economy being screwed because
| of a programming issue, or a city being screwed because
| of an internet outage, or a person and their family being
| (additionally) screwed because they offended a
| politician.
|
| If you live in a place where you can be financially
| screwed because you offended a politician, you have a lot
| more problems than if money is physical or not.
|
| Also, you are disproportionately overstating the issues
| with digital money (I am still to see an example of a
| city being screwed because of Internet outage or
| programming issue). And you are also disproportionately
| shrugging away issues with physical money (it makes
| forgery and criminal activity much easier in many levels,
| to huge damage to society).
| dijit wrote:
| fair enough that you prefer it, but personal preference
| isn't really the point is it?
|
| you said you're "still to see an example of a city being
| screwed because of an internet outage or programming
| issue"- so let me help you out there.
|
| july 2024: CHAPS goes down in the UK. that's the system
| that moves about PS345 billion per day between high
| street banks. same week, crowdstrike takes out banking
| systems globally. two separate issues, one week, absolute
| chaos.
|
| 2018: visa has a hardware failure across europe. 5
| million transactions just.. fail. ten hours. nothing.
| people standing at tills with money in their accounts and
| absolutely nothing to show for it.
|
| square, fiserv, tsys - all had outages in the last few
| years, each one leaving tens of thousands of merchants
| dead in the water.
|
| last i checked, payment outages cost US retail alone
| something like $44 billion a year. not a theoretical
| risk, just tuesday.
|
| oh, and there's currently a ransomware attack on a
| payment processor called bridgepay that's knocked out
| card payments for multiple cities in texas, michigan,
| wisconsin.. still ongoing.
| https://cybersecuritynews.com/bridgepay-ransomware-
| attack/
|
| you're right that i'm overstating nothing. these things
| happen constantly, and when they do, the blast radius is
| enormous compared to your wallet getting nicked.
|
| the forgery point is fine, i already said physical money
| has problems too. but a forged tenner affects one person.
| a downed payment processor affects a country. those
| aren't comparable problems and treating them as such is
| what i'm pushing back on.
| boobsbr wrote:
| Not an int32, but a BigDecimal.
| zvqcMMV6Zcr wrote:
| Isn't it handled by COBOL or some other ancient language that
| only supports strings?
| boobsbr wrote:
| It's Struts 1.0 running on J2EE 1.5 hosted on WebSphere
| which does the talking to COBOL.
|
| COBOL serializes everything to strings in a flat file.
|
| We're currently planning on migrating the flat files to a
| Sybase DB.
| ksimukka wrote:
| More like a float with a precision of 18.
|
| Most of us who work in payment systems care a lot about
| precision and reliability.
| parl_match wrote:
| Okay... but a float? High precision sounds great but uh...
| got a lot of issues. If you know what I mean.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| I'm not a banking programmer, or even a programmer, but there's
| no way an account balance is just an int32.
|
| There's almost certainly an audit trail. The debit and credit
| transactions for the account can be reviewed to verify the
| balance. If my electrical estimating software has an audit
| trail, financial accounts definitely do. Maybe not at the
| application level, but the accounting behind the scenes
| definitely is.
| ge96 wrote:
| Was at a checkout the other day, forgot my wallet in my bag,
| thoughts went through my mind: tap to pay? (not setup), crypto?
| (need USD, tap to pay). Had bad internet in that one spot,
| faster to run outside to my car and get my wallet.
| azalemeth wrote:
| 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 things easier for the state --
| and I've seen produce some pretty good epidemiology work where
| the government can link purchasing habits and health outcomes(!)
| -- but it's a privacy nightmare.
|
| MitID doesn't work on rooted android phones, or those running a
| custom rom. Reports from others who have disassembled it indicate
| that in fact a hard coded list of custom roms is checked against.
| It's a highly obsfucated binary, and by design is a single point
| of failure. If you sign in with an unauthorized device it
| helpfully centrally blacklists your IMEI. It's hard (but not
| impossible) to get a phone contract on Denmark without indirectly
| giving over your CPR number, so I imagine trying to get around
| this is frustrating. I didn't try and have a hardware dongle.
| One. By design, this whole system is a massive centralised single
| point of failure. It's absolutely key to Danish life.
|
| That all said, most Danes would vigorously defend privacy, say
| that the state doesn't abuse its powers, and they're probably
| right. It's a very vivid vision of the 1960s Nanny State, where
| Nanny knows best and has your best interests at heart. Most of
| the time, she does. They're frequently voted as some of the
| happiest people on earth, so clearly the recipe of pay a ton of
| tax and get things from it works well. I find the privacy lack
| rather shocking and I've never got used to it -- in quite some
| ways it's an incredibly authoritarian society although no Dane
| would ever say that, and tell me to drink more ol and get off the
| internet and go for a walk in a forest. They point out that the
| UK has far more CCTV cameras and that we have more prosecutions
| for bent policemen and politicians. There's truth in all of this.
|
| Either way, I'd be interested in seeing if they issue a post
| mortem on this. It'll cause a lot of issues for many, many
| people.
| Nekorosu wrote:
| Interesting. Swedish BankID, that I'd guess serves the same
| purpose, works just fine on GrapheneOS, as well as nation wide
| payment system Swish.
| haltcatchfire wrote:
| 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.
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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.
| shantara wrote:
| 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.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Last year, I think, I saw someone talk about trust in Danish
| society and how it works. As a Dane it's not something I
| really think about, but I their conclusions where at least
| interesting. In Denmark you're given implicit trust, that's
| the default. Trust is given, not earned. That poses a problem
| for people coming from the outside, because trust can be
| lost, but because it's something that was given to you,
| there's not really any way to earn it back. If you don't
| understand that social contract, you can mess up your life
| pretty quickly, with no means of recovery.
| shantara wrote:
| This is a topic that frequently comes up in our
| multicultural Danish company. In many countries people have
| adversarial relationship with their government, which is
| completely unlike Denmark. This mindset requires time and
| effort to change for the newcomers, and is also difficult
| to understand for people who haven't lived outside of
| Denmark.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Can you explain the social contract? Is it explicit and
| people find loopholes, or is it based on intent and the
| spirit in which an action was taken?
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Is the trust naive? Have there been instances of a government
| violating that trust? Were they held accountable?
|
| The US was a much higher trust society before repeated
| governments from opposing parties violated that trust with
| little or no consequences. This left people with no realistic
| competitive party that was trustworthy, and first past the
| poles elections ensures they only have to be slightly less
| despicable than their opponent. This also drives
| polarization.
|
| Having a multiple party system with something approximating
| proportional representation, an independent press and
| judiciary, and a smaller population and land area all make a
| large difference. The US was the last nation to use first
| past the poles for something besides a house of commons that
| was ranked a democracy by vdem I think? Definitely the last
| one to be ranked a full democracy. The largest remaining
| population ranked as a full democracy is Japan, it doesn't
| look too likely to change from the outside. Germany is next
| in size and we'll see how that goes. SK was next and they
| passed a rough test so lets hope. Large populations are
| easier to polarize apparently? I wonder if that will hold
| true with social media eroding the rural urban ideological
| divide.
| dijit wrote:
| Also British, living across the bridge in Malmo, 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...
| cess11 wrote:
| BankID is not a government thing, it's developed by a company
| founded by a bank consortium. Once upon a time the state
| aimed to build an public good in this space but bank
| representatives in the committee responsible managed to block
| it.
|
| I was under the impression that it doesn't work under
| GrapheneOS, great news that it does. Other than that it
| shares some of the characteristics detailed above, refusing
| to run if it notices rooting and the like. Also no Linux
| support.
|
| Edit: I agree that it has a convenience to it, but I strongly
| suspect it has a latent tyrannical potential and that future
| governments will exploit this to a further degree.
| dijit wrote:
| BankID also doesn't have _Windows_ support. There 's a
| defunct app that used smart-cards but it's fully deprecated
| and does not function.
|
| But yes, it's owned by the banks not the state; if anything
| though this increases its weakness.
|
| You can use BankID to identify with the tax agency, the
| public health services and police. (and more: this is just
| what I'm aware of) and there's an expectation that you have
| a BankID.
| cess11 wrote:
| Also to identify with the banks, which was the original
| purpose, and many other services. It's somewhat expensive
| to run an integration but many customers and other users
| have a feeling that it is especially trustworthy as a
| method of authentication. One use I've had is with a file
| storage platform, they have an integration so that one
| can create shares against 'personal number' through
| BankID, which our customers in the public sector really
| liked. No need for them to juggle some account, they just
| share a 'personal number' and we were good to go.
|
| The main competitor is Freja+, or just Freja, or Freja
| eID. It's particularly popular among immigrants, as I
| understand it, though not as commonly supported,
| especially in the private sector. There is also a semi-
| public electronic ID, "Skatteverkets ID-kort", issued by
| the same company that produces swedish passports, which
| is owned by the french defense corporation Thales.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| >incarcerating people for saying the phrase "we love bacon"
| at a construction site
|
| You conveniently neglected to mention that it was the site
| where a _mosque_ was being constructed.
|
| Changes things a bit.
| dijit wrote:
| You're right, it's totally acceptable to arrest someone for
| saying we love bacon at the vacant construction site of a
| potential mosque.
|
| I'm sure the construction equipment was very unhappy.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >Changes things a bit.
|
| No, I don't think it does.
| LeonidasXIV wrote:
| All of this is true.
|
| Having lived in Germany it's quite different, but I'd argue the
| centralized handling of the CPR is actually quite convenient
| and doesn't meaningfully impact privacy. In Germany every
| authority has its own ID for you anyway (my password manager
| has a category "Government Primary Keys" for this), however
| that means that you have to provide all your information from
| scratch to every authority. This would theoretically lead to
| more privacy if we lived in 1926, but now computers are
| ubiquitous and a rogue government (like Germany is close to
| electing) can just correlate these keys together. Relational
| databases have existed for decades and JOINS are cheap. Thanks
| to surveillance capitalism by now we have very sophisticated
| ways to deanonymize people, the government can just hire
| someone to do it.
|
| So the privacy in Germany is most often inconvenience for the
| citizen paired with hardly any privacy gain from a potentially
| hostile government. At this point I think the better solution
| is to avoid electing hostile governments. To Denmarks credit,
| they're currently doing that better than many other European
| countries.
| kasperni wrote:
| > but it's a privacy nightmare.
|
| I've gone the other way from Denmark to UK. And I've often had
| to mail copies of my passport or other identity documents via
| email. And my bank requires me to regular scan my face to check
| that it aligns with the picture in my passport.
| lxgr wrote:
| It's the same in the US. We're really lucky that it's
| technically impossible for fraudsters to email pictures of
| stolen passports (or stolen pictures of passports) to banks
| and other companies for fraudulent purposes.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Weird, I'm in the USA and I've never emailed my picture or
| passport to a bank, or provided it in any other way. I
| suppose they might have a very old scan of my driver's
| license, certainly nothing newer than about 20 years. If
| they have any other photo of me it's without my knowledge.
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| Italian living in Sweden, Malmo, and lived in the UK in the
| past.
|
| I don't get the obsession you Brits have against IDs, in Europe
| you are pretty much the only ones. But a lot of what you say
| resonates with my observations:
|
| - single point of failure: absolutely, but so is the "sign in
| with Google" or equivalent. It's just too convenient. I'd
| rather have a public service do it than a private company that
| can cut you out at any time without any explanation.
|
| - Nanny State: 100% also in Sweden, actually worse here. But
| historically they have been pretty good at protecting freedoms,
| so far. The UK (or Italy) may be less nanny, but have got some
| very illiberal things going on these days (left or right
| government doesn't really matter, it seems).
|
| - Happiest people on earth: I really doubt the surveys measure
| happiness. They tend to measure trust in institutions, which is
| very high in Scandinavia.
|
| - It's an incredibly authoritarian society although no Dane
| would ever say that: exactly the same in Sweden! They would
| NEVER admit any failure in their society, no matter the hard
| evidence in front of their eyes. I guess that it's the other
| side of the same trust of the previous point.
|
| - Drink more ol and get off the internet and go for a walk in a
| forest: At least you've got ol, in Sweden alcohol is taboo.
| Forests are nice, but become boring quite quickly :)
| Msurrow wrote:
| > They would NEVER admit any failure in their society, no
| matter the hard evidence in front of their eyes.
|
| That must be the swedes. Danes complain constantly, about
| everything.
|
| Edit: if you need examples.. DSB trains are slow/never on
| time/bad service/..; Post Nord takes WEEKS to get a letter
| out/too expensive. Well we switched to another provider now,
| Dao, so we'll complain they are even worse! And complain why
| they are not doing it like in the good old days (see Post
| Nord); taxes are too high; public service is too bad/slow/low
| quality; too many cars in the city; never any parking space
| when I take MY car; the paid first child sick day is not
| enough we need at least a week (just for child sick days mind
| you, we need the 5 weeks paid vaca for relaxing on a Beach in
| Spain); btw our weather sucks; unacceptable that garbage
| collection service is not functioning during show storms; ..
| i can keep going all day
| hagbard_c wrote:
| > i can keep going all day
|
| Denmark is like the Netherlands - where I'm originally from
| - and in some ways like Sweden - where I live. More like
| the Netherlands, really, Swedes are less likely to vocalise
| their dissatisfaction because they're more 'konfliktradd'
| or 'scared of conflicts'. Descartes may have claimed that
| 'Cogito, ergo sum' is one of the foundations of western
| philosophy but as far as the Dutch go 'Queror, ergo sum'
| often seems just as fitting.
| Tehnix wrote:
| >MitID doesn't work on rooted android phones, or those running
| a custom rom.
|
| I find these arguments quite strange. A big part of MitID and
| similar services is to protect you against fraud. The most
| vulnerable in society (e.g. old people) aren't running these
| kinds of devices, and I'd rather we optimize for the general
| population and the people most at risk, rather than people
| running some weird setup that is almost identical to setups a
| scammer would run.
|
| What privacy aspects are you lacking here? For all the services
| that MitID connects you to, there are government required
| responsibilities for these companies to track all of this
| information anyways and be able to provide it to the government
| if needed. That goes for banking, public services, telecom,
| etc. And this is in no way unique to Denmark, it's how most
| countries operate. Denmark has just acknowledged this and
| decided to make it easier.
|
| Did you expect your UK bank to not be required to know who you
| are and be able to track and keep records of literally all
| financial interactions you have with them and their services?
| I'm a bit confused on what society you are comparing against.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| The Netherlands had a similar system with BSN and DigiD.
|
| I personally prefer it, and I wish the country I live in right
| now had a better centralized system to deal with the
| government. It massively reduces bureaucracy and the need for
| me to produce all sorts of extremely privacy-invasive documents
| (such as bank statements, utility bills, scans of my driver
| license and passport) when dealing with the government.
| Sometimes I even need to mail those things, like, with an
| envelope.
|
| The government can and will collect all data it needs about you
| at any given time, no matter if there's a centralized ID or
| not. It just spares everyone time and effort by removing
| friction.
|
| Also, I have a very hard time to take seriously someone that
| unironically says the words "nanny state". It says a lot about
| your stance on the role of governments and society in general.
| What it says, to me, is very unflattering.
| mhitza wrote:
| > in quite some ways it's an incredibly authoritarian society
| although no Dane would ever say that
|
| Did they collectively close their eyes while Denmark was the
| latest, at EU presidency, in charge of pushing chat control?
| dheera wrote:
| WeChat effectively is all of this but _does_ work on rooted
| phones. There are _far_ too many brands and variations of
| phones all over China running various forks of Android for them
| to keep track of.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| What do you mean indirectly handing over your car for a phone
| contract?
| wosined wrote:
| And who is the happy monopolistic receiver of this constant and
| unending stream of taxpayer money?
| UebVar wrote:
| The french company IN Groupe.
| mingusrude wrote:
| IN Groupe is fully owned by the French state.
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| Just one of a dozen reasons to resist digital id.
| j45 wrote:
| At a more basic level, before software issues, digital wallets
| can run out of batteries. As can infrastructure.
|
| Electricity isn't guaranteed.
| jandragsbaek wrote:
| The primary reason this is down is usally because of certificates
| running out, that has to be manually replaced
| balboah wrote:
| In Sweden there's at least one more competitor to BankID called
| Freja. There's also some kind of EU-level system.
|
| Would be cool if multiple actors were allowed and shared the same
| kind of auth signing method so that there aren't just one point
| of failure. Or something distributed like a blockchain type of
| signing method, at least I don't think Bitcoin or Ethereum have
| downtime that often, and authorization should probably be read
| heavy only to check if some identity is still allowed
| himata4113 wrote:
| Makes me appreciate that my government gives me like 17 different
| ways to authenticate including every bank that exists.
| tiku wrote:
| Meanwhile the Netherlands is selling the DigiD system to foreign
| companies and today it came out that we are also are going to
| outsource of of our key tax systems to an American company.
| macintux wrote:
| > ...today it came out that we are also are going to outsource
| of of our key tax systems to an American company.
|
| That's a remarkable failure to read the room, given the digital
| sovereignty initiatives across Europe.
| Muromec wrote:
| There is even the digital sovereignty strategy of the Dutch
| government itself to migrate off the azure.
| Muromec wrote:
| Isn't it the hosting provide and not digid itself?
| kakoni wrote:
| Finland did that + lot more. Tax system from Gentax, EHR from
| Epic and social benefits from Salesforce.
| kevincloudsec wrote:
| when your sole digital identity provider goes down, it's not a
| service disruption. it's a national infrastructure outage. the
| blast radius of a single authentication system is the entire
| country.
| dude250711 wrote:
| They went to Linux recently didn't they?
| Croftengea wrote:
| How ironic to see "MitID remains inaccessible" and "You are in
| charge of your data" cookie banner on the same page.
| Tehnix wrote:
| I see a few people here complaining about the idea of a central
| digital identity service.
|
| As a Dane, having lived in other countries, MitID is an insanely
| superior to anything I've ever tried. It simplifies so many
| touchpoints with the government, and is honestly such a good
| upgrade going from nothing -> physical NemID card with codes ->
| digital MitID (literally "My ID").
|
| The only real disruption I'd say is if you happen to be buying
| something online that triggers the 3DS prompt (an additional
| security layer to prevent cards getting stolen/scam). In Denmark
| the 3DS prompt for VISA at least uses MitID to verify you are the
| owner of the card, so that'll obviously not work when MitID is
| down.
|
| I'll say, it has been surprisingly stable though otherwise, and
| disruptions usually aren't a big impact (I literally wouldn't
| have known unless I saw this HackerNews post).
|
| As for a centralized identity system: I personally see this as an
| acceptable contract for living in a society. Most countries have
| SSNs anyways, your taxes and many other things are tied to this.
| Centralizing this identity allows the government to streamline so
| many things to give a better service to their citizens. For
| example, all official communication goes to your "DigitalPost"
| email inbox, your verify identity with "MitID", and every person
| or company has a registered "NemKonto" tied to them for any
| salary or government payouts.
|
| I maybe see people get tripped up at the concept that your
| government should actually care about the service they deliver.
| That's probably already the point where we diverge when talking
| about if these things are a good idea or not.
| winstonwinston wrote:
| > I see a few people here complaining about the idea of a
| central digital identity service.
|
| Digital identity service is fine for gov services. It's not OK
| as a hard requirement for anything else such as banking.
|
| Digital ID in my country is down for about 7 days and counting.
| iOS app no longer opens after the recent update. I cannot pay
| tax without digital id app working but i can do banking and
| everything else.
| Tehnix wrote:
| > It's not OK as a hard requirement for anything else such as
| banking.
|
| What's the alternative that you think is okay for that then?
|
| Certain businesses have regulatory requirements to know and
| verify your identity (banking, telco).
|
| A UK poster gave an example of how they need to mail the bank
| a copy of their passport and other private information.
|
| I'd certainly much prefer simply using a digital login
| solution as an alternative to that. They can verify I am who
| I say I am, without needing my passport which I would
| consider a much bigger privacy invasion to hand out.
| winstonwinston wrote:
| I have an electronic certificate for sign and verify on my
| physical national identity chip card. You either use it
| physically or online but only at times when identity
| confirmation is required.
| delusional wrote:
| > It's not OK as a hard requirement for anything else such as
| banking.
|
| It is in fact not a hard requirement. It just happens that
| when you have a relatively cheap and efficient digital
| identity, which is by definition trusted by the government,
| banks will use that to reduce risk. It's not that they can't
| verify your identity any other way, this is just the obvious
| and easy one.
| xquce wrote:
| Dane by choice (refugee). Would just add as a counterweight to
| the negative views from people outside the country.
|
| From a technical and user point of view, MitID have had less
| outages than Cloudflare, AWS and MS Azure in the last year. While
| I agree with the single point of failure, I also like that I
| setup my startup with all government and banking online via a
| login I had the last decade, painless and faster than most places
| without having to upload a single document in many a unsecured
| ways I heard from my US and Other European friends (outside the
| Nordic countries).
|
| Yes we Danes trust our institutions more than others and trust is
| given by default and then lost, rather then "earned" (I would
| argue bought) in other places.
| kkfx wrote:
| Not a cryptobro but... The only acceptable digital identity is or
| local (smart-card) or a blockchain kept by any connected citizen
| on his/her own iron. The Orwellian dream of the nazi will cause
| pain also to those who push it.
| dang wrote:
| Can anyone tell us the current status? I put "was down" in the
| title to be conservative, since usually these things get resolved
| after a few hours.
|
| I converted this to a Tell HN post since there didn't seem to be
| a good 3rd party article about it in English (yet, at least). The
| submitted link is in the toptext. (Submitted title was "MitID,
| Denmarks sole digital ID, has been down for over an hour and
| counting".)
|
| (p.s. In case anyone is wondering, I think this was a good
| submission with aspects worth discussing. It set off the flamewar
| detector, so I turned that off and re-upped the post a bit.)
| Doerge wrote:
| The linked page has 3 down updates, then says it's back up
| again after the 3rd one. So presumably resolved.
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