The initial limitation to Google/Android is not great, we know that, and we have support for other OSs on our list (like, e.g., GrapheneOS). It is simply a matter of where we focus our energy at the moment, not that we don't see the issues.
Personally I recently switched from an AOSP based android without Google Play to Ubuntu Touch. In the future with better hardware support I will probably switch to postmarketOS.
You are copy pasting a “correct” argument against eu bureaucracy in the absolute wrong space
Using smartphones with such a setup should not become required by a European government on a fundamental level.
Sufficiently detailed telemetry is indistinguishable from surveillance because even if the goal isn't to target you right now, they will still have the secondary option of going back and inspecting all that data you sent them if they ever are interested in you. Another secondary use of telemetry is selling it to someone else to squeeze out a bit more money. There's no downside to doing this, so any business that collects a lot of varied telemetry and likes making money might as well do it. And once the data is in the hands of adtech businesses, it becomes a whole lot more like tracking you personally than just collecting some data for development. In Google's case, you don't even need to hand it over to anyone else, everything stays in-house.
The limited selection of attestation providers can be criticized for many other reasons, though.
Such public utilities ought to always prioritize privacy, platform-independence, and empowering market competion long- and short-term. And to achieve that you need to start at the design level.
In this case, clearly, you either have to avoid relying on app attestation or lay the foundation for an unrestricted number of independent chain of trust frameworks.
The latter, of course, is a policy-level issue, but the ones responsible for the design and development are the ones who need to pass such concerns up the chain.
Simply put: this will never happen. Way too many devices implementations to make this a reality.
If your answer is "none", you missed the point.
If you were averse to carrots (without any health restrictions on eating them), would every government institution in Germany be required to serve you carrot-free food?
If not, why should they be forced to accommodate every smartphone brand in existence, even if there's only 3 people in Germany using it? THe list has to end somewhere.
Can't speak for Germany, but they do in the UK. It would be illegal discrimination against a belief for them not to.
UK law protects some philosophical beliefs equally to religions. (what qualifies is a bit of a mess as it's all case law)
(On a practical note, I imagine it's easier for hospitals to just serve vegan food for anyone who is vegetarian/Muslim/Jewish rather than have specific kosher/halal meals)
But to answer the question in a real way: Veganism is often regarded as just a dietary choice like any other, when in reality courts in several countries have more or less agreed to classify it as a matter of conscience, which would give adherents some right to it. Though it seems German courts have been reluctant to draw much legal consequence from it - so far at least.
So in that sense, I don't think people have been talking about digital sovereignty and abstaining from proprietary software under another country's jurisdiction much as a matter of conscience yet. We can thank Trump that it might actually become a thing though.
For it to be fair comparison, the carrots would have to be grown by a foreign company, known for using unsafe growing practices, causing contamination. Eg, poison carrots. This same company would have to be under the control of a very hostile, very actively aggressive and threatening nation.
Such as one currently threatening to annex allies, among other things.
With the US literally tapping and spying on heads of foreign states:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Parliamentary_Committee...
and there being lots of ways to spy, such as push notifications:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/governments...
Only insane people would objectively decide to use Google or Apple anything for any form of ID. Those platforms should literally be outlawed. Any use of push notifications or identity attention should be looked at as utter fantasy.
Here's a secret for you. There really isn't any urgent requirement to have an electronic identification method. It can wait. Supporting legislation can be passed first. There are lots of ways to do so.
For example, the entire EU could pass legislation stating that all cell phones have open source code available, including all binary blobs for drivers. And that all phones are unlockable, and that (for example) the phone has a version of the rom you can download without any Google services.
(If Apple isn't able to compete here, well... too bad)
The phones would not be legal to sell, unless the open source firmware was compiled in front of regulators. The point of this is another pet-peeve of mine, it would allow people to support their own phones, for that source code would be released the day that phone was no longer supported.
And yes, it's trivial to have open source firmware blobs. There just isn't a market for it. Pass a law, and sellers of SoC and other ICs will capitulate, or maybe more punitive laws will be passed against them. As someone once said, yes companies can have a lot of sway.
But governments have police, courts, and armies.
Right now, Android and Apple devices are a literal arm of the US government's spying apparatus, even if those two companies actively work against it.
Do not trust Google Play. Do not trust Firebase. Do not trust Google. At all.
Are Germans just too trusting? I remember 15 years ago, when nuclear power plants were closing, concerns were raised about the reliance on Russian natural gas. These were waved away. Russia? What's wrong with Russia! They're almost allies, they're capitalists now!
Don't do this again.
Do NOT trust Google. Don't. Don't make it a core part of any identity management.
Imagine, needing an active Google account to even bank! Or to file your taxes, or even to prove who you are!? Google cancels accounts with no recourse, no reason why, won't help anyone, and this is to be the core of identity management for Germany?
The average person won't even be able to install any German Government designed apps, unless they are on the Play store! Are you going to teach Grandma how to use ADB to install an app? Without an active Google Account, will you even be able to use push notifications?
Why would a government even allow ID to be blocked by the requirement that a company with terrible, horrible, inane customer service, which just kills accounts without recourse, be a gatekeeper?
No Google account, no ID! Wha!?
It's literally not sane.
Germany at least seems to feel international war is only a few steps away and from how militant the Chinese and Russians have been treating their “territory” I am not sure it is a bad call.
America has likewise turned bad preferring violence over dialogue and loves tracking “hostile influences on the American way of life”. Those influences being anyone who would call out the toxic culprits making America into a cesspit.
Tying to Apple and Google? It is a terrible idea. Both are prone to freeze devices for financial or social issues.
However, a fix I would accept is to force the device makers to support multiple accounts out of box on every device to keep separate what the corporations have proven time and again they cannot be trusted to combine. Also for those companies to be forced to make a cheap credit card sized device which must be held to power on for the few that truly hate the ecosystems.
I don't understand why this is not the default to be honest, and why people are not advocating for that
What's wrong with ID cards and cash?
This is an understatement. Better phrasing would be "when it allows two unaccountable foreign companies to lock citizens out of the digital market".
There are plenty of horror stories of tech giants frivolously banning people. We shouldn't be adding state support to that. I don't want to lose access to digital banking because of some deliberately vague "community guidelines" violation, or because I got mass-reported to some "e-safety" provider that both Apple and Google outsource to.
Sibling comments see this as a good solution, just not a perfect one. I see it as making a bad problem worse.
The usual 80/20 rule applies here as well.
And if you really are a German citizen, you know how slow the wheels of government already turn in Germany, I assume next week you would be the one complaining that "Germany is so far behind" and that "other countries are so much faster at implementing stuff" :)
Can't buy any single fare public transport tickets online here in Stuttgart? Sure, I'll use the DeutschlandTicket NFC card. Can't view the EPA? Fine then I don't. Can't pay with Wero? Fine, I don't actually need to use shops that don't offer SEPA Vorkasse or Lastschrift (only without a dodgy "identity verification" fintech startup of course.
No one wants support for toasters and washing machines. We're talking general purpose compute hardware. TCP is also supported on all these devices. Quite frankly, it's probably easier to implement, if you are not fighting a locked-down OS like iOS.
It's a pragmatic, profit-oriented point of view, but not one that makes sense when your mission is to be inclusive of everyone.
Why device attestation is required is quite well explained by this github comment [0]. I am in the industry and I agree fully with it, because it is a fact a problem for most smart phone users in terms of security.
0 - https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-app-andro...
I'm not going to replace my 1200 EUR smartphone with a device that forces me to have an account with Apple or Google. I've been issued a German identity card, which is its own computer that includes a digital identity already. I also own an expensive card reader, which together forms a system that is completely capable of supporting any attestation anyone would need. They should just stop excluding me already.
Then keep using it, instead of the not-mandatory app?
> I also own an expensive card reader, which together forms a system that is completely capable of supporting any attestation anyone would need.
Sure. In the mean time, do we tell the other few dozen millions that don't have an expensive card reader to go fuck themselves, or can we get to work on a solution that, even if not ideal, makes their lives easier?
> They should just stop excluding me already.
They aren't. You said it yourself, your ID is in your pocket.
Well, in all seriousness what examples could you give me here in terms of device hardware attestation? Even GrapheneOS does use Google root certificates to attest your device. There is indeed an option for EUDI to keep a list of keys and I bet this is probably the way they are going to go for Android in the future. We shouldn't forget this is still in the planing phase.
> to have an account with Apple or Google.
True for Google, not true for Apple. Device attestation on iOS does not require you to have an iCloud account or sign into some Apple services. It works entirely using device hardware ids.
> I also own an expensive card reader, which together forms a system that is completely capable of supporting any attestation anyone would need.
Nope. This is eID and verifies your identity, it does not attest the security of your hardware. These are two different problems we talk about here.
The reader and its firmware is already certified by the federal IT security agency BSI for use with eID and banking. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to use that for whatever digital identity wallet thing the EU is cooking up?
My Librem 5 runs an FSF-endorsed OS and has a smartcard.
> True for Google, not true for Apple. Device attestation on iOS does not require you to have an iCloud account or sign into some Apple services.
This is extremely misleading. Even if true, you must have an account in order to install any app on an iPhone.
Ok, so how does that help with device attestation? If I am an app developer how does it tell me that your OS has not been tempered with or actually that my app has not been tempered with? Are there any cryptographic keys stored in a secure place on the device that the Librem vendor can verify?
> This is extremely misleading.
But it's not. It's an architectural difference between how Google and Apple implemented attestation. Apple stores the generated keys in a secure part on your device and certifies them. The rest is your job as an app developer. And as a user, you do not have your iCloud or iTunes account used for device attestation. In contrast Google and its Play services are an integral part of the attestation workflow.
For Apple it's evident from their docs. As a side note: I do try to learn more about this, because of an incoming project concerning it.
> You can’t rely on your app’s logic to perform security checks on itself because a compromised app can falsify the results. Instead, you use the shared instance of the DCAppAttestService class in your app to create a hardware-based, cryptographic key that uses Apple servers to certify that the key belongs to a valid instance of your app. Then you use the service to cryptographically sign server requests using the certified key. Your app uses these measures to assert its legitimacy with any server requests for sensitive or premium content.
Source: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/devicecheck/establ...
This is not your business to verify and control what can run on my phone. I can do it with my smart card, which securely stores cryptographic keys.
> And as a user, you do not have your iCloud or iTunes account used for device attestation.
It does not matter. An account is necessary to make the phone usable at all. The attestation is useless on a phone that can't install apps.
Yes of course. That is one of it’s fundamental issues.
You chose to use a non mainstream platform. Thats on you.
And personally as a software developer myself i know that nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution. No one will prioritize or give budget to change it later "because it works"
Let me get this straight: you can be a defender of human rights, aligned with the country you live in, but if you fall in disgrace with the American government, _you can't even do transactions with your own country_.
So this is fundamentally flawed, and violates the fundamental rights of German citizens in Germany.
[1] https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/british-icc-chief-prosecutor-l...
Imagine cheering for the company that will block the criminal prosecutors investigating war crimes and genocide from having the ID at all(1) once the supporter of the investigated sanctions the law-abiding persons: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/impo...
But anyway - why the requirement in the first place?
(1) because sanctioned person must not be allowed to create another account.
I know someone who happily codes "verifiable credentials" in Elixir, disregarding all externalities.
Especially considering that mobile-ID has been around since 2007.
Smart-ID sucks. It's not truly hardware-backed, it's proprietary and has fundamental flaws like not having a direct link between the site being authenticated to and the authenticating device (auth can be proxied, just like if it were just plain TOTP).
SIM-based solutions on their way out is a non-issue. For eSIM to support that use case, political will only is needed: the EU got Apple to abandon the lightning cable, this is not any different.
Fundamentally can't be, it'd be a whole new solution.
> For eSIM to support that use case, political will only is needed: the EU got Apple to abandon the lightning cable, this is not any different.
Mandate every phone vendor to EAL4(+) certify their eSIMs? I'd love to see that, but I'm not sure that's a viable approach to take.
Plus, the process is something like:
- we want to do $something
- hire consultants to help us define $something and produce a document
- hire other consultants to write the specs for the project
- launch an RFP
- select a winner
- wait for the implementation to finish
All the proposed solutions will be something paid, ideally made by a really large company to lend it credibility, and with maintenance costs that justify hiring dedicated people for it.
In the end no one gets what they want.
You think if there was any will wouldn’t the whole EU use whatever the Estonians are doing very well?
Yes.
> You think if there was any will wouldn’t the whole EU use whatever the Estonians are doing very well?
Using the Estonian system would be vastly preferable.
If politics doesn’t allow that, the political environment is broken.
Instead they could have mandated the use of eIDAS 1 to all countries + extend it with attribute/credential support, and let countries choose their implementation (cards, SIM, server-side).
Instead we’re back to the drawing board with the big shortcomings highlighted in this thread.
Banks are giving out QR Tan. Optical TAN devices which work with credit cards and it has been going pretty well. Why can eiDAS not have something similar. Distribute hardware tokens. Get rid of dependency on any OS.
The issue then becomes the UI/UX. If the legal mandate is not strong enough the solution will not gain enough ground. You can see this if you start comparing those countries with an eID rolled out.
And a suggestion: add external HSM support at least? (e.g. things like NitroKey/YubiKey)
[1]: https://eudi.dev/latest/architecture-and-reference-framework... I suppose?
They can be trivially rooted, then they spoof the signature and get a pass in Integrity while being wide open for malware (or cooying the ID, ID presume).
> a local internal WSCD, which is a component within the User device, such as a SIM, e-SIM, or embedded Secure Element,
So you could issue SIM-cards / eSIM profiles that only do signatures and nothing else. The app then connects to such eSIM (and you keep your main SIM/eSIM in another slot).
The less stupid variant is, of course, to get mobile operators to issue SIM cards with e-sign capabilities. Estonia has that, for example: https://www.id.ee/en/mobile-id/
It works great. Just keep in mind that newer phones are starting to deprecate physical SIM slots. At the same time certifying eSIM implementations to the same EAL level is an absolutely crazy task.
GrapheneOS uses standard Android APIs for hardware attestation (as opposed to Google-specific ones), so why don't you just use those from the get-go?
This is simply unconstitutional and should be escalated ASAP if you don't want to end it before the appropriate court in Leipzig, Karlsruhe, or maybe Luxembourg.
Provided you know the secret key to a government-issued certificate. Making it impossible to copy said certificate is not really a requirement for identity verification.
Rooted, wildly insecure devices can pass the attestation easily: https://magisk.dev/modules/play-integrity-fix-inject/
Safe, updated devices cannot unless they permit Google to run their surveillance services in the privileged, unconstrained mode.
I think we need some fingerpointing that EU officials strive to avoid.
Authorities/anyone could verify that it's not counterfeit. And photo should be checked anyways to match the person.
So I also don't see the need for attestation. For ID check it should be ok without. For signing stuff ofc it is not resistant to copying. But EID smartcard function already exists.
While it's dramatically worse than devices Google refuses to certify (ie these not running their spyware as privileged services).
It’s also illegal on both accessibility grounds as well as violating the eIDAS spirit of no dependency on specific providers.
By shrugging it off as “not great”, you’re also dooming every citizen to have to comply with whatever whimsical terms of service Google and Apple have.
Have you ever tried to unban your Apple/Google account? So in effect, everyone’s access to eID services will depend on some crappy automation some intern in California setup to detect “abuse” or whatever.
There are technical solutions to avoid this dependency and you’re probably getting paid to find, research and adopt them. So … do your job?
https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...
Or to put it another way, is a smartphone required? If not, that would already clear up a lot of issues, I think.
EDIT: Whoops, just saw the answer to another comment asking precisely this. So it's not a requirement. Good. Is there a legal framework that ensures that this remains the case? Otherwise, I fear it will become a de facto requirement over time.
If you read French:
* https://www.plus.transformation.gouv.fr/experiences/4531155_...
* https://linuxfr.org/users/jch-2/journaux/l-identite-numeriqu...
I'm also thinking of keeping an android phone purely for auth purposes, separate from my main one. The world's most overengineered (and probably also less safe) Yubikey.
> If you read French
Let's see how far my five years of French at school will get me. I'm not getting my hopes up ;)
> We have to use some kind of attestation mechanism per the eIDAS implementing acts.
What does this attestation need to prove? Is this only about ensuring that private keys are managed by a secure enclave or a TPM?
> we have support for other OSs on our list (like, e.g., GrapheneOS)
I appreciate that, even though I am really not enthusiastic of eIDAS. But time will tell. Thank you.
Concerning secure enclave - what other device except iphones and Pixels have it actually safe?
It's hard for me to assess the effort needed here, but I guess that the GrapheneOS implementation will be 99% like the regular Android implementation. Supporting both systems does not seem to be that unrealistic.
Nice... so the rush is to delegate power to the large American platform?
If this is your plan, please go back to the drawing board.
Excellent. Massive respect to you for doing this. This attestation business is an existential threat to "other" operating systems. I'm glad to see people are putting effort into supporting them.
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Paying-without-Google-New-conso...
Do you realize where this path is going?
Certain European governments would have greatly benefited from KYC/attestation in the late 1930s had it existed.
You can even run it on OpenBSD or TempleOS if you want to.
Cost saving measures.
Its funny to see that I can access the bank account through FaceID but to actually make a payment I need to use an SMS code.
What is your fallback for such an important vital service?
Edit: but as pointed out elsewhere in the thread, Play Integrity is not the only way to do hardware attestation on Android. GrapheneOS devs have a guide: https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...
So avoiding proprietary Google stuff altogether is possible and we should encourage it.
Sounds like these "eIDAS implementing acts" are the problem, and were influenced by ulterior motives.
You should be ashamed of being involved in this monopoly handover to American big tech.
Yes, I assume malicious intent, sorry, seen this happen enough tines recently.
Companies and providers (like banks) have to support it, but use is voluntary.
Check out the spec and legal framework, it actually makes sense and is open to different implementations, though you might need to certify it.
Kinda like the discrimination DB does for people using paper tickets vs those using the DB Navigator app.
As a separate device, it should be offline always IMO, and perhaps the size of a passkey. Or one of those banking devices with a display that show an authenticated text saying what you are confirming.
....wow, that would be reinventing the existing model of the leading ID cards....
Crazy if you think about it :)
Private smartphones are excluded already.
The device chain is a classic misdirection, it seems everyone here is just following Meta’s lobbying to put this into the OS.
Even the carrier layer would be better than the mobile device layer.
Or, you know, just look at Singapore’s or Swiss National SSO - it functions on an app that layer just fine, no issues
See https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-app-andro...
Translates to:
"We have to make sure citized accessing the public service have not control over the device per the eIDAS implementing acts"
For those that do not know, that is the only way to get the Google account back is to use a hardware 2FA in the first place....
AND yubikeys are $60 per yubikey...and generally you want 2 including a backup
and therefore the app cannot give a reasonable guarantee that it is not running in an adversarial environment that actively tries to break the app's integrity. Thus, the app cannot be used as a verified ID with governmental level of trust.
Conveying authentic information across untrusted channels (your phone screen, say) has been a solved problem since asymmetric cryptography was invented back before I was born
For most governments that is a very low bar.
Can you elaborate on what this means? Who is the adversary? What kind of 'integrity'? This sounds like the kind of vague language DRM uses to try to obscure the fact that it sees the users as the enemy. An XBox is 'compromised' when it obeys its owner, not Microsoft.
The whole point in reducing the blast radius is valid - by all means make this optional and allow the user to elect to tie their identity to the device. For everyone else, implement validation of actual transactions, not just user secrets and device secrets.
Think of it this way: A physical ID (which is what we're trying to replace here) also has limitations, it looks a certain way, has a certain size, etc. Just because somebody wants a smaller ID or one with a larger font or a passport in a different colour or whatever, doesn't mean that this should be allowed or possible. Some limitations exist for a good reason
It's ridiculous that you look at all of us being forced into a government-protected duopoly, and then say "Don't you dare force your decisions on us!" to anyone suggesting that this should not be the default. Rules for us, but not them.
Because how do you make sure it's the user who does those modifications, willingly and well-informed? That it's not a malicious actor, not an user getting socially engineered or phished? Incredibly difficult compared to the current alternative.
If it's not a software root of trust that provides an attestable environment like Android or iOS. It's going to be a hardware root of trust that provides an attestable hardware environment, like SGX. I can predict no other practical avenue taken. Unless the orangutan really forces a demonstration on how untrustworthy these environments can be and a lot of money and effort is spent.
But yeah, the user could have a choice to this extent.
The world has gone absolutely mad, what the fuck am I even witnessing? It is quite literally becoming 1984 in front of my eyes, with people complying completely voluntarily and openly advocating for it, not even a threat of force to make it happen.
Demanding full control over something like an ID will fundamentally not happen. The same way you won't have full control over the way passports or paper bills are made.
Take for example the expectation that some poor fool's ID can't be cloned and reused by malicious actors - full control directly contradicts that. It will not and must not be possible.
If I am lashing out, it is because this is perhaps the most dangerous thing I've ever seen proposed, and it is deeply distressing how people are sleepwalking into it. To be honest, if I were German, I would probably just kill myself the day I was legally mandated by my government to register my identity with Google. That might sound hyperbolic, but I'm really not kidding. I have lived with privacy, anonymity, and freedom for all of my life. If the future of this world is one where the government and Google have complete control over every single thing you do, I'd rather die having lived a satisfying life than witness the horrors that are to come.
Proof: things mostly work now without all the surveillance state shenanigans.
More proof: humans have lived full and fulfilling lives without "proving identity or age or citizenship to someone hundreds of kilometers away"
This is honestly not a good argument - it makes you sound desperate and puts in doubt your mental stability. I don't think you actually have mental problems, I just mean this this kind of argument comes off bad.
Also nobody is forcing anyone to do anything. You don't have to own a digital ID. It just makes things easier, because you can sign things over the internet, or present your phone instead of your plastic ID. Both things already have alternatives (qualified signatures and regular physical ID), so no immediate harm is being done.
Don't get me wrong, I am personally anti bigtech, I try to degoogle as much as possible, and I find the thought of my government coercing me to use google/apple duopoly repulsive. I dislike that, but using phones (instead of for example dedicated hardware) IS pragmatic, and you are not forced to do anything.
Sent from my pixel phone.
> Sent from my pixel phone
This contradiction is not even funny. Sent from my Librem 5.
Can you please elaborate on that record?
As to the well-established track record of doing evil... gestures broadly everything? Google in particular has built an empire on stripping away people's privacy, and they regularly ruin people's livelihood by eg. shutting down Youtube accounts incorrectly with automated systems and no way of ever reaching a human for support unless you're famous enough to make it a PR issue. Apple is the same, just recently with a thread on HN lamenting that Apple was destroying their business because they revoked their dev license, or in other words, a private company unilaterally revoked the ability of a business to create mobile software for billions of devices. And now we want to give them control over our IDs? ????????????????????????
Worse still, for new mainstream devices that are believed to be safe the state sponsored actors will likely operate unpublished exploits, and will exploit the misplaced faith people and judiciary will put in device attestation. I dont think the very likeable people who worked on Pegasus found themselves respectable jobs - they are likely still selling that sophisticated crap to all authoritarian regimes.
It is absolutely insane to put this amount of power in 2 foreign companies that will be able to destroy your life with zero reason, oversight, or due process.
Source: I have a banned Google account (it's over 20 years old at this point). I know the password, but Google doesn't let me log into it. Every few years I try to unsuccessfully recover it.
If you have a Google account and having it banned would be a problem for you here's my advice: migrate. Right now. You never know when one of their bots will deem you a persona non grata.
Another fun thing Google did is to automatically (without my consent) add a required second-factor authentication to my current Google account. I have this old, e-waste tier phone that I use mostly only as a glorified alarm clock, and at one point I used it to log into my current Google account.
Imagine my surprise when I tried to log in to my Google account from somewhere else, and it asked me for an authentication code from this phone. Again, I have never explicitly set it up as such - Google did this automatically! So if I were to lose this phone I'd be screwed yet again, with yet another inaccessible Google account that I will have no way of recovering.
At this point I don't depend on any Big Tech services; my Google account has nothing of value associated with it (only my YouTube subscription list, which is easy enough to backup and restore), and I pay for my own email on my own domain, etc. So if I get screwed over yet again by a big, soulless corporation that just sees me as a number on their bottom-line, well, I just won't care.
As long as the capital city is in Washington, this is normal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Revelations
The existence of eIDAS itself is already a big problem. They're going to try to gradually push laws to make it so that you'll need a government issued signature to do anything. That's when they'll have total power over you because they can simply refuse to issue.
Modern computing and communications technologies can be leveraged to build infinitely stable authoritarian regimes. It's even possible for democracies to stumble into it on their own as they attempt to regulate these new technologies. In hindsight, the Internet was built wrong. It has a top-down structure which all of human civilization is beginning to mirror.
The more this signature is necessary the harder it becomes to deny issueing it to somebody.
I don't see how this changes much compared to nowadays. You can already require an ID for all kinds of these and the government already has total control over those. So what changes? China manages to ruin the lives of the people illegally born under the 1-child-policy for decades already, all without systems like eIDAS.
You can't protect yourself from authoritarian regimes with tech or good policy since those will just get ignored. Look at Trumps war with Iran, where did Congress agree to it?
I'm not a fan of these systems either, I also think software should be open and no vendor lock-in should exist. But I don't think this will change much to be honest.
And in the EU it's already nearly the case. The dystopian horror that KYC/AML has become for honest citizens is beyond belief. And they're of course hiding behind the excuse that "bad guys are laundering money": but going after actual drug dealers, of course they're not doing that. We now have articles wondering if Belgium (where most of the EU institutions do live and where all these totalitarian laws are passed) has become a "narco-state" (where criminals make the rules).
People's life can be ruined when some employee, somewhere, decides he wants to bumps his SAR quota (Suspicious Activity Report): you can have a real-estate transaction fail (and have hence moreover to pay a 10% penalty to the other party) if either a notary, bank employee, real-estate agency employee decided that they've got the nostalgy of the Gestapo-time and decided to act like a good little nazi (yes, Godwin's law: for we're literally talking about totalitarism).
I recently had an notary's employee bother my brother for the source of funds when he bought an apartment... A quarter of a century ago. A quarter of a century ago and he was talking to my brother as if he was a criminal for he didn't have access anymore to the bank wire transfer from 25+ years ago. It's crazy for the exact same controls had already been done 25+ years ago when he bought the apartment. And the notary's employee fully knows that. (regarding that case my brother is currently looking into the national federation of notaries and he's going to file a complaint: he's got emails from that notary's employee that are totally out of line).
The problem is way too much power over the lives of others is put into the hands of petty people: petty bank employees, petty notary employees, petty public servants. The same kind of people who were all too happy to out jews during WWII and who were making sure trains would leave on time.
I previously had a folder where every single money transfer of more than 10 K EUR was saved: I know do it for every transfer below 5 K EUR. And these are to be kept forever for I know that me or my wife or my daughter shall invariably meet motherfuckers asking them "proof of the source of funds from 30 years ago when your father bought that collectible car" (worth less than 20 K back then btw, but worth 6 digits now).
Just fuck these systems and fuck anyone working on it and fuck all the nazis participating in it.
Contrast that with chat control.
My government can read my WhatsApp messages? Not good!
What’s the non-technical narrative here?
[1] Maybe with cash, for now, but cash is clearly not long for this world, and your bank account will be inaccessible already.
I don't think we can win this fight. Personally I tried to advocate against eIDAS in Austria and I've had negative success. After my warnings, people like it more.
"Oh, it's an EU thing? it must be good!".
But then again, maybe there is nothing that can be done. It boggles my mind that even on HN most people are defending this. It seems like freedom is a completely lost cause.
> Get banned from society for life
Also, that same lifestyle is based on ignoring externalities applied to commons and/or events happening “somewhere else”, even when factually proven. Little wonder and tiny bit ironic that the same principle has embedded itself so deeply, that it holds true even when the damage is inward, just a few indirections away.
On your side, yes, I think that “people in Europe” intuitively understand that, it just needs time to blossom. The reputation/trust damage self inflicted by the current US administration is triggering a pushback that will expand into the future. As a point in case, it will lead to reconsidering assumptions on habits that many generations of US businesses and diplomats have built.
Many in this thread point at difference instances of services that should be decoupled. Connecting the dots, the larger picture looks painfully obvious to me: Silicon Valley never was a partner to be trusted, and certainly not after they built or bent every business to rely on an ad ecosystem that exploits users.
That original sin, on which a huge portion of Wall Street rests, is now at the center of discussions. Hence, the EU will build tools to address this because it has to, but consumers will flock to them especially from the US, since at this point no one can trust SV companies on data privacy (since Snowdens at least), no one can trust the US administration to protect citizens (since Trump at least), and about half of the US is scared about what’s going on deeply enough (the emotional push needed to break the habit). They will move their data it the EU (where else? China?).
This will be compounded by the fact that everyone tries to build better LLMs and to get AGI, while forgetting that LLMs work on data pipelines.
This barely even seems like the relevant part. If Google was founded in Japan and Apple in Brazil, it would still be foolish to entrench them as a dependency. It would barely even be better to do it with a local company.
> They will move their data it the EU (where else? China?).
This feels like hopium. Network effects are powerful and as long as the internet is actually global, there are really only two options: 1) Centralized megacorps, and then the US ones have both the US apparatus behind them and the incumbency advantage, or 2) open protocols where no corporation of any nation is a gatekeeper.
So for Europeans to get the hooks of the US incumbents out of them, their best chance by far is the second one, and that one is also mostly to the advantage of the Americans who aren't the existing incumbents, which is why it works. Start making phones with open hardware and social networks with open protocols and you can get people outside of your own country to use them because they don't much like the incumbents either, and that's how you reclaim the network effect. Try to clone the US megacorps without the US apparatus to get them established in other countries and they don't because they're wary of foreign central control, which in turn means you don't get the network effect and you lose.
But then it's not so much that data ends up in "the EU" as that it's on your own device and then backed up or distributed as encrypted chunks in a distributed network which isn't tied to any specific jurisdiction.
Open protocols are kind of thing techies do when in cooperative mode, when industry isn't looking. But this is not this kind of problem - this is an economic, geopolitical problem. It's not about your local school moving off Windows to Linux, it's about the European corporations moving off Azure to some other cloud solution offered by European corporations (do we even have any?).
I'll grant it, the turmoil of such transitions is a perfect moment for pushing for open protocols, federated solutions, etc. - the industry is distracted, there's more space to sneak in some good solution before everyone notices, and EU has cultural and political tradition of pushing towards FLOSS (even if largely just as an alternative to Microsoft) and associated values/memetic complex. But open anything won't save the day - more corporations will.
It's a blind spot for some software folks, because they forget that FLOSS is an exception here; everything else in the real world - including computing hardware and supporting power and network infrastructure - plays by rules of market economy, with proprietary solutions and clear structures of ownership.
It makes no sense to try and fight this here - but it does make sense to go along with the flow and improve things by pushing for more globally optimal solutions, especially that EU is known to be favorable to using openness in protocols and standards as a policy vehicle, both internally and externally.
Scaleway and OVH? Although I’m not sure how they compare at scale to AWS / Azure / GCP.
i am not advocating for a pure "open source will save the world" there are just a few points i'd like you to consider, and hopefully give me insights i can learn from
* other than code, open source has also given us governance "experiments" capable of running critical systems. As another poster was mentioning, the risk is to fallback on "big corps", usually run by "big man", and we are back to zero. The hope? expectations? is that the open source governance ecosystem has tackled this space in enough dimensions to be able to build something over this. I am looking specifically at the area around licenses (mariadb, redis, ...) and just overall governance frameworks, as in "deteach business ownership from ethical frameworks"
* in order to build anything this big/reliable, without megacorp budgets, you can just ... pay FLOSS? They are one of the 2 majorly screwed groups by the current SV setup (with PLENTY of cavaets,amongst them that SV is a huge open soure contributor) The other one being content creators. Slogan? "For this to succeed, you need the best coders and the best marketing departments in the world" Looks to me like incentives are aligned towards them being available. Talking broadly on a systemic level: details need refinement, and space beyond this single message.
* EU (the political instituion) desperately needs this. An innovative tech ecosystem (not startup, not product) driven by "european values" that puts them on the spot. Start with redefining it: there are no users, but citizens. Something effectively out-innovating SV, not just trying to get on par. The risk of "being bought out/copied" doesn't really apply, since (as I said in my original comment) the discriminator is existential: US companies cannot be trusted because they built the existing system. Any attempt to block this (stop users from getting their data back) is going to be challenged by the EU (GDPR violations cannot be brought to court by citizens, only by nation's data authorities, which means a citizen gets big guns and doesn't ned to pay). Also, go on and explain that to all you other (US and not) users.
* A EU cloud provider doesn't have to provide the same services an US provides. That would hardly be innovative. You also don't need to focus on corporations. Provide data storage for citizens, that will be the basis to build a privacy focus cloud, and then business might want that. There is a possible continuation into "advantages of storage&privacy based vs compute", that i skip.
But essentially, to me it seems that an open source, true, "give me back my data" business driven initiative has never been as actionable as now. I short, such a project can make 2 bold statements "We are more innovative than SV" "We have better freedoms than the US"
> But then it's not so much that data ends up in "the EU" as that it's on your own device and then backed up or distributed as encrypted chunks in a distributed network which isn't tied to any specific jurisdiction.
100% i launched into a long trajectory from the comment i was originally answering to, and stopped short
i think-of? dream-of? try-to-build? what you just said
my "in the EU" claim is mostly around legislation (EU art 8 vs US CLOUDS act vs vs China approach to citizen's data)
the legislation is there, since GDPR it's a matter of tools
since corps built tools, they "forgot" to add the third button on cookie banners: "give me back my data" ... (and fourth: "delete it") but the legal framework is there, as well as most of the tooling (google takeout, and so on from all other major players)
it's not that pipelines for moving data from US corps to inidividual do not exists, it's more that, up to now, whenever i was talking about "data rights" to people, even in tech, i got yawns back
now we have a "perfect storm": distrust towards US (administration, collpasing onto US businesses) + global uncertainty towards AI (where lots of people just perceive something happening but lack any tool that gives them control over it)
this is what i perceive as a tectonic shift that can be used innovatively, by EU businesses, hopefully leveraging open
for completeness, i have indeed wrapped "EU" as the spearhead for this, given the incentives to build it, but yes, central authority over this should live inside of each citizen nation framework (see, Japan and South Korea, both providing legal frameworks for data protection)
Like every school shooting, every energy crisis brings opportunity to saturate the airwaves with shallow noise that gets people overly upset and they’ll ignore everything else.
Every player on both sides is abusing this mechanic for all eternity.
What worries me is that it's a real global problem in all of our non-autocratic societies. On a positive note, I can see how this is actually becoming a common understanding and gaining traction, as hyped AI products are seen by some as 3rd-party- or SaaS-killers. It seems like we know how to differentiate between independence and dependence, and evaluate any risks affiliated with such a decision. But it baffles me that this differentiation manages to float as some ironic stream in our Zeitgeist, and just barely manages to be taken seriously.
Public debate and assessing politicians and parties would be so much cleaner then if they couldn't use polarizing issues to rally their support and do w/e they please on all other issues.
You are hoping "good minority" will get its way ahead of "evil majority" in indirect democracy but if anything I see the reverse happening in a lot of Western countries today.
Although it is a more recent development since a certain billionaire (what else) took up politics as a side hustle.
So far the best modern improvement I’ve seen (and it could be further improved of course) is the increasing use of citizens assemblies.
Taking speed limits and road safety in general as example I feel vocal minority of car enthusiasts are holding the silent majority hostage and that's the reason we don't have more sensible regulation in a lot of EU countries.
At least their version has an obvious solution: Make electric cars and solar panels and then stop having oil problems.
EVs are just mechanically much simpler, with a shorter BOM that largely centers around Asian (particularly Chinese) battery, REE, and semiconductor supply chains, so hundreds of thousands of good jobs that supported Germany's industrial model are now economically obsolete.
Parents can't control what their children are doing 24/7, and neither should they. But they should expect a society where children are protected from billion dollar corporations stealing their attention and radicalising them, at least until they are old enough to leave mandatory schooling.
There are many "real world" age restrictions that exist, and we have decided those are of benefit to society in general. The "online world" is no different.
If we can't have age restrictions online then they should just be abolished in the real world as well, in the name of preserving "privacy and freedom". The online world doesn't exist in isolation like it did in the 90s and 00s.
Also the EU and all those states are also highly incompetent and pretty much only depends on low quality contractors. For example there is very little discussion and info about the fact that the EU digital infrastructure just got owned by what seems to be a random hacker group [0].
- [0] https://cyberalert.com.pl/articles/shinyhunters-eu-europa-br...
You write it as if companies provided tons of help to parents and children. Meanwhile, they spend a lot of money to make it as hard as possible.
Second, kids in Germany have generally a lot more freedom and there is less of knee jerk impulse to blame parents for every accident. Expectation is that adults dont harm them without parents having perfect control every sevond.
The issue isn't the phone, it's that a __government__ is depending on an unregulated private enterprise.
What does this "crimes against currency" mean? I live in several countries at once with different currencies, and I never had a problem with this. And top of this, I travel a lot. I have accounts in 5 countries, in 6 currencies. Should I pay attention to something?
When you realize the tiny tiny percentage of people that have a phone that is not apple or google, you understand why few people are up in arms.
It simply doesn’t affect many people.
Whereas if the collar is touted as fashionable and the lock is hidden until it's engaged, now your problem is not that people don't care, it's that they don't know, which is different.
I’m just saying there are not many people impacted, so there are not going to be many people making noise.
People are simply too deep in the trenches of day to day to object to things that don’t impact them personally
A: exclude these people from society or force them to switch to big tech, and
B: accept the consequence where a single other country holds access to everyone's identity information for convenience reasons (because it works for the 99% that are too tech-illiterate to install software that they control instead of the other way around)
It's also ridiculous how it seems we've forgotten computers other than smartphones exist and that not everyone even has a smartphone, let alone with an Apple or Google account.
Great, I can pay with a digital Euro, Wero or something else, without routing my payments via VISA. I just can't do it without an account with Apple or Google. I'm absolutely baffled by politicians, regulators, banks, merchants and implementors lack of ability to think more than one or two steps out.
Sure, the EU is forcing 3rd. party app store, but no one is using them, so no one is pushing apps to them, especially not governments, banks or payment services, they'll be the last to use them.
Wero however is currently only planned as an android/ios app period. There are rumors that a card will come but that's only rumors for now.
In your list of groups to be baffled about I would add journalists. You see many articles about Wero mentioning digital sovereignty, but have you seen any that criticize the required banking apps only being available in google's and apple's app stores?
The regulations sometimes feel like additional burden of the user, but not for the manufacturers (aside for the attestation logic); consider:
> (MEETS_STRONG_INTEGRITY requires a security patch in the last 12 months)
Think about how this essentially codifies planned obsolescence due to not forcing the manufacturers to maintain the devices for life.
Yes and if you look back this is not new. Just look at the extraordinary restrictions that apply to:
- What houses you can build,
- What vehicle you can drive,
- What food you can grow and sell.
The result is real estate has become unaffordable for younger people, our car industry is being annihilated, and the agriculture sector hold by a string.
The digital realm enjoyed an unusual level freedom until now because the silent and boomer generations in charge in the EU understood nothing about it.
Now that the EU is getting involved in "computers" we are starting to understand why peasants have been protesting in Brussels and calling those people insane for decades.
Austria's courts also ruled ages ago that rooting your own device cannot be a legal reason for OEMs like Samsung to refuse warranty coverage, since you can run whatever software you want on hardware you bought.
Maybe your country sucks? Don't blame it on the EU.
And here we can simply examine the tax structure and conclude that the problem isn't whether the country sucks, but whether the side you're on sucks.
After all, how can housing be affordable for ordinary workers if they have to subsidize from their own pocket free university, cheap housing, electric cars, high wages, and everything else for the privileged class?
> Maybe your country sucks?
And maybe your country sucks too. It is just North Korea is also the best country to live in (if you're Kim Jong Un).
While enjoying a high paying job in probably a still very unregulated domain (computers/internet related).
This is not about one country vs another.
The problem is you cannot have a society with everybody winning on both fronts unfortunately. You also need people making, cleaning stuff, growing food, cooking, etc. Not everybody can live in the capital with "very cheap all electric state-subsidized rental car" and Vienna is probably not food self sufficient...
No, but Austria is. And our farmers enjoy much support through subsidies - from the EU and our own budget - and social protections, often having better and cheaper health care than most other Austrians, since they are insured under their very own social insurance law (BSVG), contrary to other employees (ASVG) and self-employed (GSVG).
Farmers also enjoy very high levels of respect and appreciation here, even in Vienna.
> While enjoying a high paying job in probably a still very unregulated domain (computers/internet related).
Calling Information Technology an 'unregulated domain' in the EU when we're all busy implementing NIS2 regulation and preparing for the Cyber Resilience Act entering into force soon seems disingenuous.
Yes, thanks. This was my original point "the agriculture sector hold by a string". It is by design unsustainable and if you cut those "high levels of subsidies" it collapses.
> Calling Information Technology an 'unregulated domain' in the EU when we're all busy implementing NIS2 regulation and preparing for the Cyber Resilience Act entering into force soon seems disingenuous.
Yes this is why I said "still"
This is no different to subsidizing public transport, because having this infrastructure local and autonomous is just strategically important enough for the tax payer to finance it. Would you say that public transport in EU capitals is "holding on by a string"?
That's just not possible, or should the system be legally required to run on an Apple II?
If only currently popular platforms are to be supported, how could a new platform join them in the future if the use of existing ones is mandated by governments?
The viable solution for that is to provide a trusted hardware implementation that can be used with any computing platform that has a documented interface. It can't be a software-only implementation, basically.
Countries have centuries of experience providing attestation services through notaries. Germany is even infamous for requiring them for things that would sound ridiculous even in Brazil (both movie and country)
I can’t see why governments couldn’t incorporate this existing infrastructure into the digital world. Make them sell hardware ID wallets, enforce the real identity owner to be present to invalidate a previous ID or whatever, and add legal restrictions for the government not be able to alter these registries
You can give your physical cards to other people or give them access to your computers, too.
> Germany is a strict liability country, and you will be fined or imprisoned for anything that is done with your identity card that was cloned because your PC was infected by malware if you don't report it stolen.
I don't see an issue with this.
The technical solution is a hardware root of trust. This is typically a specially hardened chip in the device. A Trusted Platform Module (TPM).
Your Apple ][ does not have a TPM. It cannot run software that can assess it's identity in a trusted manner.
This feels like laziness from German implementers, as they don't want to (quoting the spec literally) "implement a mechanism allowing the User to verify the authenticity of the Wallet Unit".
0: https://eudi.dev/latest/architecture-and-reference-framework...
1: https://eudi.dev/latest/architecture-and-reference-framework...
https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-app-andro...
> We understand your concerns and truly appreciate your suggestions. As previously mentioned, this is not something that is enforced by the reference implementation — these are simply recommendations, not requirements, for any wallet implementer. That said, we recognize that this is a sensitive topic, and we may need to revisit it, even at the level of recommendations.
> The README files for both the iOS and Android Wallets have been updated to mention only OWASP MASVS compliance, without referencing any specific APIs.
I understand their position, but I also get the concern, especially around existing implementations like the Italian app. I think it's mostly that they have different priorities than ensuring that the reference implementation is a perfect guideline for member states.
This looks like a good vector for a European Citizen Initiative around removing all technological dependency on non-EU providers.
1. Google and Apple have a much larger ecosystem and are entrenched in their OSes, which means that they have a much better picture of the user than any government app ever will. They also have surveillance mechanisms that government apps are unable or unwilling to implement. This helps detect and prevent fraud (fraud prevention is mostly just mass surveillance used for good).
2. The eIDAS standards enable anonymous assertions about your identity. This lets you prove your age to a website / app without revealing any other information. There needs to be a way to prevent you from generating millions of such assertions using one ID and giving them out online to anybody who wants them, verified or not. The way you do that is by limiting their generation to trusted hardware, using hardware attestation mechanisms. Google and Apple provide those.
3. Pure laziness. It's an issue that <1% of the population cares about (which is hard to notice if you're in the HN bubble). Almost nobody uses a modern, eIDAS capable smartphone without a Google or Apple account. They may have decided that the part of the population who cares about this just isn't worth pandering to (just like some government institutions may decide that vegans aren't a part of the population they're interested in pandering to).
There can be good reasons for a bad thing, and it's important to factor them in when having a discussion.
Anonymity isn’t anonymity if you can’t generate millions of them cheaply.
Either the government secures internet payments themselves, which means spending now to do so, coming up with a plan, ... or they can have Apple/Google do it.
You can smell where this is going, no? This is how the EU is looking to make any kind of internet authentication go through them. By providing companies like telcos with an online identity that says "if a customer clicks 'buy' logged in through eIDAS and they don't pay, EU courts will if needed get the money from their homes, their mothers, sell their dog to make sure you get paid".
Then things like forcing kids off the internet, the always returning porn and copyright regulations rules and so on will follow.
For 99% of smartphone users, you can't get apps onto their phones without Apple and Google signing the app and letting you into their store, and users can't install the app without an Apple/Google account.
Why remove a dependency on Google, when you'll still be 100% dependent on Google?
Anybody working on "Digital ID" has already made peace with the fact that it can be turned off overnight if Trump says so.
Yes not many use it but if you cut this path off then people will never get there.
Its the same as with bicycle paths. Initially - those make no sense, leading from nowhere to nowhere. Give it a few years, and a usable network emerges.
Right now there is serious money and brainpower being poured into sovereign cloud tech. Thanks to the gift of open source and standards, its actually not impossible to create modern systems with zero US dependency.
I fear, though, that as with everything else Microsoft Excel will be the hardest dependency to deal with.
It's not necessary to provide the functionality and enforces the dependency onto he potentially hostile actor (case in point: Microsoft disabling email account of Chief Prosecutor of ICC because US requested so).
It stifles innovation in the future and hurts GrapheneOS right now.
Let me turn the question back at you: why do you think adding unnecessary dependency is better than not adding it?
Does it serve users, governments, service?
Does it anything good for the interested parties or does it only serve Apple, Goggle and the US government?
Let's not act like things have always been this bad and thus we should just accept it as the norm, because they haven't, the noose is actively tightening as time goes on.
Plus, the net difference is that this gives Google and Apple the ability to kill the ability of individuals to make payments (and tax them) ... do you want that?
(And I would say, compared to having European banks tax them, the answer is not so obvious)
The real issue is, of course, that this moves the burden of keeping phones secure onto Google and Apple, who are very willing to take on that burden in trade for a percentage of all consumer payment traffic in Germany. It's yet another choice between "spend money now to build a government department to secure payments ... or have Apple/Google do that for you". And they're choosing to save a little bit of money in the short term in trade for what is effectively a new tax.
Sure, their researchers are great, but Google itself claims that several years old phones running Oreo are safe and secure. They also extended the time for vendors to bring patches to the new vulnerabilities, they themselves slowed down - compare timeframe between patches released by GrapheneOS and patches released by Google - the latest GOS release provides patches for vulnerabilities that will be fixed by Google in.... October 2026: https://grapheneos.org/releases#2026040300
I do get that that's not exactly impressive. It isn't.
This may not be unwelcome for authorities considering the recent extrajudicial “unpersoning” of many political enemies in the EU.
I don't think it's a bad idea though. If only for bringing the issue to the public
And while I do think an alternative would be good, the fact is that protecting the private key is the most important part (for example by keeping it on a smartcard with NFD) - hence why the need for a secure device
"but I want to install alternative Android etc etc" yes that's fine - but you know this is a non-secure-(enough) env.
But then to save cost including the support cost banks stopped and instead started to require a non-rooted Android/iPhone.
But I think there are still cell operators without sim card
I feel like this is getting to the point of gaslighting. Many of the allowed devices are bargain bin Android phones running out of date software with known vulnerabilities in both the operating system and the hardware which is supposed to be protecting the keys.
Meanwhile you could be using a hardware security module in a bank vault in a nuclear bunker surrounded by armed guards and the excuse would be that this "isn't secure" because it hasn't been approved by Google or Apple.
Governments shouldn't be requiring you to use any specific vendor or set of vendors. They should be publishing standards so that anyone who implements the standard can interact with the system.
Yeah you could, but most people won't
Should they allow for a yubikey on a non-google phone? Or your own private key? Yes they should. But then there's the issue of enrollment, etc.
When something is required by law, it needs to work for all people.
It also specifically needs to not entrench incumbents by impeding the ability of challengers that don't currently have market share from ever getting any.
> Should they allow for a yubikey on a non-google phone? Or your own private key? Yes they should. But then there's the issue of enrollment, etc.
There is no such issue because enrollment should be part of the standard so any device that implements the standard can be enrolled.
No I do not. It is plenty secure compared to a corporate version and nobody should be legally able to deny service over me having control over my own computer.
Needing the entire OS to be secure to protect a key is also a dumb idea in general.
This is the final step in the road to full remote attestation, thankfully PCs already come with Microsoft Pluton chips[1] to make it easier.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/hardware-...
Either governments can develop (and pay for) THAT technology, or they can use Apple/Google ...
Government software is usually low-quality, expensive procurement crap, often riddled with security holes, and an exercise in checkbox checking. UX and user friction can't be expressed as a verifiable clause in a procurement contract, so they're ignored.
Besides, every time EU governments tried to force smartphone manufacturers to pre-install government apps, the population freaked out over (unwarranted) surveillance concerns. This isn't something you can do without pre-installing apps (you don't want these APIs opened up because then attestation loses all meaning).
Not necessarily the company that locks out entire family because one of the family member jacked off on the chat with Gemini model.
The scenario it would prevent is that a government gets a filled in form with someone requesting unemployment benefits, or reimbursement for a medical procedure on account X ... and then government finds out after payment, later, in court, that the owner of the phone never agreed to it and it needs to pay it out again (because the claim, true or not, that a scammer initiated the payment agreement in some way rather than the owner). Same for business and agreeing to a loan and ...
It is NOT to protect you, the owner of the phone, against scammers (it does not really do that at all), it is to protect companies and especially governments AGAINST the owner of the phone. It is a way to fire most EU government employees by allowing automation that currently can't work because you can't legally trust phone and internet automation to be binding in court.
So they're just going to use the Apple/Google standards and declare the job done. So it's theater from all sides. Politicians will pretend this is a good solution because they don't want to spend real money, and they really want to tempt EU kids to get loans on their smartphones because, you know, in the EU you're protected from companies exploiting you. Of course, that just means governments will have to do it instead.
I mean you could use Huawei and others, but the FUD campaigns against chinese manufacturers was pretty agressive in the EU.
So one may argue that the implementers are only taking the pragmatic approach regarding something that is out of their hands.
Also you weirdly forget all the Chinese phones. There's also some tiny European brand which will have absolutely no way to limit their users dependency on the famously hostile and unconctactable provider.
I don't know what the eIDAS 2.0 requires in term of security but it may make the choice the implementers made here unavoidable in practice, as hinted by @webhamster.
If so, it seems that a solution, if technically possible, might be to mandate that OSes provide the required security features without tie-in.
The outrage in the comments feels a bit like people yelling at clouds...
So you're claiming that Mobian doesn't exist? PureOS doesn't exist? PostmarketOS doesn't exist? Ubuntu Touch doesn't exist? SailfishOS doesn't exist?
Now, "other" than Apple/Android is so small as to be negligible and governments also have a duty not to waste taxpayers' money, which means not spending hundreds of thousands to cater for an ultra small number of people who have an easy access to an alternative.
To have government apps work only on iOS and Android is perfectly reasonable in the current state of the world where this covers 99% of smartphones.
the fundamental flaw with that approach is that it is totally unreasonable to have government apps in anything other than open source and fully public systems. nothing else can really be trusted, and any private/closed source option should be disqualified from the get go.
the reason is simple: you can't trust private entities or opaque systems, and you can't trust government either, thus the solution has to be fully transparent or you're doing nothing.
the problem with that is that it is hard, expensive and/or inconvenient.
If it's not possible to create such a system for mobile phones because of legal issues (as you seem to acknowledge and judges have found in the past), then the focus would have to be on creating hardware devices in the EU, ideally with open source hardware and software. These can be made reasonably secure, have been used by banks for a long time, and would enhance digital sovereignty.
What I find unacceptable is the attitude "well, it will violate the law but as a matter of practicality it's the only choice we have right now so we'll just do it."
I don't disagree. I am just pointing out that this is wishful thinking right now.
As said, Europe has zero footprint in hardware or software so the choice is either not to develop any digital services or to accept that they will run of foreign hardware/software because everything is either Android or Apple and runs on hardware that is from US/Taiwan/China.
Developping honegrown alternives is pie in the sky or a 20 year project if we are optimistic (which I am not)...
Frankly, many comments, and the reactions to mine, show how out of touch and idealistic or naive the HN crowd can be.
Yeah, quite ahead in terms of making anonymous phone numbers illegal and requiring the government to know your phone number.
And if you don't want to use a smartphone, ID Austria does not work with regular FIDO security keys, you need special ones. Same for the old SmartCard system which didn't work without government-mandated malware.
It seems to imply that the already existing way of authenticating via eID, which is the auth chip present on our ID cards, will still work, if I read it correctly? I understand OP's link to refer to a new, alternative system, that can be used without the ID card.
But take this with a grain of salt, I'm not very well informed about the whole topic.
A paper or certificate can prove an entity trusts your identity to be <firstname, lastname, etc...> but that shouldn't be your identity.
You just are. Not your google Id, not your Apple Id either of course.
Governments are lame.
>You just are/I just am
Is not an acceptable thing to say to a bar tender when being served an alcoholic drink when you're 22. You hand them government issued ID.
In 2019, the EU created an eIDAS compatible European Self-Sovereign Identity Framework (ESSIF).
How is the government lame, here? We've had the infrastructure for 7 years now.
If you have a FIDO device on your (physical) keyring or a keyboard with a smart card reader or some kind of NFC transceiver connected to your PC, the problem is technically solved - just not practically.
Adding to this: anyone older than 12 years old is required by law to have their government issued ID on them at all times when in public. If your ID is suddenly your smartphone, you're essentially required to have that on you 24/7. Dystopian spyware.
Around a decade ago I was working at a company that used smartcard login for authenticating to internal sites. I've heard of many others doing the same. USB card reader worked fine in both IE and Firefox at the time, so I take your statement to mean that we've somehow regressed since then (not surprising) or this was an isolated instance of success (less likely, considering the US government also uses this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Access_Card).
Tragedy of the commons, nobody seems to have bothered to work on it. It's not like Chromium or Firefox wouldn't accept contributions.
They might have some great software _somewhere_ but I have yet to see it.
It does not have good UX because good UX was never the objective.
This was more than 30 years ago. Now we have a great culture of overregulation.
Everyone is trying to cut costs so as to be able to compete there and Europeans are paying the cost of financing this.
Personally I'm going to wait until the average car age in China crosses the 10-year mark to get a new vehicle. Until that happens there will be no incentive to think about longevity.
See also this issue from 2025 where the developers responded: https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/eudi-wallet/wallet-developmen...
AFAICT, there is no mention of an Apple or Google account being required in general - the documentation just lists "signals" that are used to securely authenticate a person - such as Google's/Apple's security ecosystems. I am not sure what this means in practice. Can anybody with deeper understanding explain the actual implications and possible outcomes?
(Note: BMI is the German Federal Ministry for the Interior)
Explanation: https://mastodon.social/@pojntfx/116345725515845020
There is in practice no known way around it for now, and even less so one for regular people, to use this on a device without a Google account
Because you'll be stonewalled by devs because they can't really changer decisions made bu higher ups.
Edit: I'd sign it, but don't want manage and diffuse it.
If you don’t have an iPhone or an android, you can get a physical one time password device.
The MitID design is strange, but in this regard it is well done.
Gladly.
There was a time window 2 years ago where it appeared that I need an actual phone number to do my taxes, but even that was replaced with something more universal.
Requiring citizens to have (buy) some device to simply prove they are who they are seems hostile and dystopian to me. Some say it’s the future; I’m not convinced.
However, if you were to allow me to use my pocket computer (and nothing else) to prove I am who I say I am, you would want to trust that I am not pretending to be somebody else after extracting private keys from their phone or whatnot. I.e., you would want to require some sort of trusted computing.
Currently, that seems to only be provided by closed ecosystem phones.
Even still, I think it’s a mistake to be rolling out eIDAS as a mobile app first. The specification allows for this to be a dedicated hardware key (maybe even something YubiKey-like, and the EU already requires all phone manufacturers to have USB-C), so why not start with that.
Actually, that is not what’s happening. Based on further research, the use of eIDAS is required to be left up to citizen’s decision.
You're linking to a bugtracker. I doubt they're inviting people to spam it with duplicate entries — valid as I think the concern is. But maybe it says somewhere that you can leave feedback here and I just haven't seen it?
From their README:
> We are interested to receive feedback on all aspects described in the document. To provide feedback, please file an Issue on OpenCoDE.
https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/eudi-wallet/wallet-developmen...
Does this lock Germans out of society if they dont buy American tech?
These are expensive products, you need depth of expertise and experience to create a system that could compete with the likes of gmail and Microsoft and ... so it's not a wonder that this hasn't happened yet. But pretending like this can be a public service is foolish (too high stakes ~~if~~ when it gets hacked), and pretending like existing providers that offer identity and email are sufficient is equally foolish. Google and ms and apple etc all offer the basics for free, and this is necessary for mass adoption. It will be an expensive project. But necessary, if the eu wants strategic autonomy.
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Oh and requiring a us based account is not even the most egregious part of this proposal, ffs
We're currently paying a small tax to the US for each card transaction we have.
> MEETS_STRONG_INTEGRITY also includes the requirement that the device has received a security patch _within the last 12 months_
Good luck with that.
GDPR good, but oh no... gotta spy on everyone now.
Play Integrity could the worst offender here, as it can be leveraged to force a user to have installed the app through the Play Store. Indirectly, requiring a Google account.
Sometimes I wish the Germans had an island of their own somewhere up north near the american continent.
> unknown system image (e.g. custom ROM)
Oh no, what a horrible crime, somebody dared to modify operating system on their own device..
BUT government do not want sovereignty more than they want snoop on citizens.
Please prove me wrong, I genuinely want to understand the implication of the linked document.
What I don't understand is: ELSTER (taxes) already uses electronic signatures, don't these signature already fulfil the requirements of eIDAS? Why do we even need Google/Apple?
As an example, an EU citizen working in Sweden should be able to submit Swedish tax forms whilst living here by using a digital identity from the originating nation.
There are also some standards in place like ETSI standardized extensions to PDF signatures so that you can verify that a signature inside the PDF was actually signed by a specific physical person (the standard is there but it's not fully used throughout the EU yet due to some legacies).
Implementation is a bit of a mess still but things are converging.
Slovenia hands out certificates for online government services, including document signing, and it seems to be going fine, with the added benefit that Google can't take away my access.
The big question is how to let users properly handle their certificates so they won't get abused into being useless.
If I understood it correctly, the German current Ausweissapp seems to require NFC to read it from your personal id card together with a PIN code you got with the card, it's not entirely user-friendly since aligning the card with your phone seems to be prickly.
Swedish BankID handles it internally in their app (unlocked via PIN's) but they don't have a good way to use it to sign things (It all relies on the infrastructure even if they give out signature documents it's not compatible with pADES).
There's a new govt sponsored one that I assume will piggyback on the personal cards/passes that are readable via NFC.
Norway and Denmark iirc supports proper signatures but I don't think the certificates are under user control (someone correct me if I'm wrong here).
Now these things are mostly issues for document signatures, authentication is often handled via other flows.
What I skimmed from the article, it seems to be more in line with Swedish BankID and is actually fairly smooth for end users even if less secure than what they have now with Ausweissapp.
Eidas tries to harmonize these implementations across EU member states.
Several paid providers for X.509 certificates exist but document signing certificates cost around 80 € per year [0]. And if I want duplicate X.509 certificates for my redundant Yubikeys then the cost doubles.
Other providers require an initial deposit and then charge per signature [1], which leads to intransparent pricing. In the interest of open commerce, I strongly believe that securely signing an electronic document should cost the same as my manual signature, i.e. nothing.
A partial solution already exists because I can use my electronic ID card with the AusweisApp to prove my identity when interacting with German authorities. This feature is generally useful because I live outside of the EU, but I especially appreciate that I can have my OpenPGP key signed by Governikus (a government provider) to prove the key belongs to my name [2].
Technically, I should be able to use my certified PGP key to sign documents, but in practice most non techies don't know how to validate my signature. For the average user opening my signed PDF in Adobe Reader, I would need an X.509 certificate from a trusted Certificate Authority for users to see the green check mark.
[0] https://shop.certum.eu/documentsigning-certifcates.html
[1] https://www.entrust.com/products/electronic-digital-signing
I assume this should be "intra-EU"? I'm not very familiar with eidas so I'm not sure, but afaik it's about signatures within the EU, not between different EUs (as there is only one in this world). (I hate this inter/intra wording, always have to translate it in my head to understand whether it's like internet (between networks) or like intranet (within a network). Would recommend using "within-" instead of intra whenever it's not already a well-established word, like intranet)
- someone sends you a docusign link
- you sign up with your email
- you sign with your name in a cutesy font
Theres a dispute? Well it was going to end up in court no matter how you signed it anyway. This has all the hallmarks of a design by committee project by people whose salary is paid regardless of demonstrating market fit, productivity, usage, plain sensibleness...
Can I also send the Docusign document via Signal without Docusign knowing the person who signs it?
Because that is what the eIDAS is supposed to deliver on top of cryptographic validation of signatures.
The fact that it's ALWAYS a docusign is the ridiculous part. It is just a glorified where you enter your name and email. No need to pretend otherwise. Any other service would be just as good. This is basic human sheep-like behavior?
electronic IDentification, Authentication and trust Services
Fascism is the reality.
And its global.
Global fascism is what is already the case.
These days an ID system that doesn’t work online is next to useless.
https://www.ausweisapp.bund.de/en/open-source I just saw that it's available in alpine.
So I tried installing it on my postmarketOS smartphone and it runs out of the box: https://i.imgur.com/nRIAyrq.png
My Shift6mq is listed has not having NFC support in postmarketOS, so I can't actually test it, but I assume the USB card reader option will work once it's supported.
There is a mixure of incompetence and big tech aggressive lobbying on gov 'standards' all over EU... making anything internet hard locked on big tech ultra-massively complex software, protocols and file formats.
In my country, it is the web: classic web support interop was actually killed 10 years ago. Now, only web apps requiring one of the gigantic and ultra complex web engines from the WHATNG cartel are working. No more "small' web engines (including their SDK) does work, and it did close the door for good to anything 'not big tech' (here the WHATNG cartel), what a bummer, oopsie!
In means in my country, to interact with the gov agencies and dependencies, you are now FORCED BY LAW to use only WHATNG cartel web engines. Wow, corruption (there is big public money there)? brain washing grade lobbying (what seems to be the case)? incompetence (always expected on complex matters)?
To add insult to injury, in my country, the ONLY person who have the power to fix that is the prime minister (then also the president). Oooof!
Of course, very simple classic web sites do work on 'smart phones' (apple did threaten to remove its browser... we know why: to force a technical hard dependency on them since they have a significant amount of the "market").
We all know their weak spot: a simple and stable in time, "good enough" to do the job, set of existing protocols/file formats (to protect the SDKs, I would include the computer languages, for instance excluding c++ and similar for plain and simple C and assembly to protect against the obviously ultra-complex SDK components): it will reduce dramatically the complexity and size of any current and future, local, implementations.
What's seems to be happening when I look at that: some people all over EU countries are trying to fight their way out of big tech because of gov officials probably being brain washed by lobbying (do not exclude the possibility of "corruption" and there is always some level) of incompetence which is expected).
Since it is happening in France and Germany, core of the EU...
Now what?
It is so clear how lobbyists operate here. I'd call it undermining national sovereignty.
App attestation does not require an Apple account nor a google account. For Android, it does limit the ROMs to Google certified ones and requires GMS to be installed if Play Integrity is used. An alternative option, would be to use the Hardware Attestation API directly, GrapheneOS would be thanking you.
I've spent a good amount of time implementing exactly this type of system for a backup service.
his document specifies a way to cryptographically attest the integrity of a HTTP request hitting a server.
The attestation proves the request came from a device and attest the legitimacy of the bootloader, OS and app.
Google and Apple are in a privileged position to be able to bypass the app attestation though, so depending on the threat model, it's not bulletproof.
edit: Play Integrity could the worst offender here, as it can be leveraged to force a user to have installed the app through the Play Store. Indirectly, requiring a Google account.
In the past, when you had a proprietary tool you needed to use to do something, people could analyze and reimplement it. The reasons to do that varied - someone needed "muh freedomz", someone else wanted to do the thing on an unsupported platform, someone else wanted to change something in the way the tool worked (perhaps annoyed by paper jams)... Eventually you could end up with an interoperable FLOSS reimplementation. This has happened with lots of various things - IMs, network service clients, appliance drivers, even operating systems, and this is how people like me could switch away from Windows and have their computers (and later phones) remain fully functional in the society around us, perhaps with minor annoyances, but without real showstoppers.
Remote attestation changes this dynamic drastically. Gaim (Pidgin), Kadu couldn't be made if the service provider like AIM, ICQ, Gadu-Gadu etc. could determine whether you're using the Official App™ from the Official Store™ on the Official OS™ and just refuse to handle requests from your reimplementation. They could still try and be hostile to you without it, and often did, but it wasn't an uneven fight. Currently we're still in the early days and you can still go by in the society by defaulting to use services on the Web, using plastic card instead of phone for payments etc. but this is already changing. And it's not just a matter of networked services either - I bet we're going to see peripheral devices refusing to be driven by non-attested implementations too.
Secure boot chains have some value and are worth having, but not when they don't let the user be in charge (or let the user delegate that to someone else) and when they prioritize the security of "apps" rather than users. The ability for us as users to lie to the apps is actually essential to preserving our agency. Without that we're screwed, as now to connect ourselves to the fabric of the society we'll need to find and exploit vulnerabilities that are going to be patched as soon as they become public.
The same freedom is being abused by malicious actors. Even on Windows (like BlackLotus), but also on pre-infected phones emptying people's bank accounts. This is an incredibly unfortunate outcome, but what's the solution?
I see no other potential outcome than that free computing and trusted computing are going to be totally separate. Possibly even on the same device, but not in a way that lets anyone tamper with it.
Most importantly - it's the user who needs to know whether their system has been tampered with, not apps.
False analogy. You can’t have your kitchen knife exploited by a hacker team in North Korea, who shotgun attacks half of the public Internet infrastructure and uses the proceeds to fund the national nuclear program, can you? (I somewhat exaggerate, but you get the idea.)
> Systems can be secure and trusted by the user without having to cede control
In an ideal world where users have infinite information and infinite capability to process and internalize it to become an infosec expert, sure. I don’t know about you, but most of us don’t live in that world.
I agree it’s not perfect. Having to use liquid glass and being unable to install custom watch faces is ridiculous. There’s probably an opportunity for a hardened OS which can be trusted by interested parties to not be maliciously altered, and also not force so many constraints onto users like current walled gardens do. But a fully open OS, plus an ordinary user who has no time or willingness to casually become a tptacek on the side, in addition to completely unrelated full-time job that’s getting more competitive due to LLMs and whatnot, seems more like a disaster than utopia.
Isn’t the status quo, that you need to intentionally choose to allow this?
Some countries do :) Though I think physical analogies are misleading in a lot of ways here.
> Systems can be secure and trusted by the user without having to cede control, and some risks are just not worth eliminating.
Secure, yes, trustworthy to a random developer looking at your device, no. They're entirely separate concepts.
> Most importantly - it's the user who needs to know whether their system has been tampered with, not apps.
Expecting users to know things does a lot of heavy lifting here.
Which was the motivation for cryptographically attesting the boot process and OS, and in part paved the way for app attestation.
There are alternatives though: The Android Hardware Attestation API enables attestation on custom ROMs, but the attestation verifier needs a list of hashes for all "acceptable" ROMs. GrapheneOS publishes these but there's nobody, to my knowledge, maintaining a community list.
Cryptographic attestation is not a problem in itself, the problem is exactly what you already somewhat hinted at: it's who and how decides who to trust and who gets to make (or delegate) the choices. You can make a secure system that lets the user be in charge, but these systems we're discussing here don't (and that's by design; they're made to protect "apps", not users).
The problem with modified phones containing malware is very real and unless you want a full on Apple "you're not allowed to touch the OS" model you need some kind of audited OS verification that you as a user or a security sensitive software can depend on.
But to remove that incentive you first need to stop punishing app companies for compromised user OSes from legal perspective.
Are you willing to absolve Google, Apple and Deutsche Bank from responsibility of damage that happens on compromised user OSes?
And this malware is largely based on open source code (Linux) that was originally developed on open, documented hardware, where the firmware boot loader did nothing more than load the first 512 bytes of your hard disk to address 0x7c00 and transfer complete control to it.
Yes, there were viruses that exploited this openness, but imagine if Linus Torvalds would have needed a cryptographic certificate from IBM or Microsoft to be allowed to run his own code! This is basically the situation we have today, and if you don't see how dystopian this is, I don't know what more to say.
I will never understand why such an overwhelming majority of people seem to just accept this. When frigging barcodes where introduced, there were widespread conspiracy theories about it being the Mark of the Beast -- ridiculous of course, but look at now where in some places you literally can't buy or sell without carrying around a device that is hostile to your interests. And soon it will be mandated by the state for everyone.
Google must be destroyed.
To me, there is no difference between your sentences. You require the blessing of an American company to be able use eIDAS. Google has the power to disable eIDAS at a national scale by making the attestation services treat all devices as not certified.
There should be NO reliance whatsoever on a private company not under the control (direct or indirect) of the government let alone a foreign private company.
Edit: I just noticed your username and the fact that your account is very new. Are you astroturfing?
App attestation can fail on simulators, Graphene OS, dev builds, I've seen it all. There is one check you can do to see if an app was side loaded, so indirectly, can require Google account.
Title is still misleading though, as it explicitly mentions accounts.
Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps (1196 points, 16 days ago, 1262 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47442690
But in pure technical & UX terms, you don't need to be logged in.
I said the title is misleading, which it is.
Your argument that app attestation should be avoided because big tech company can withhold it is garbage. It holds no water. They can cut off access to the app in general by removing it from the app stores and the devices that have it installed.
American big tech has Europe in a stranglehold, I agree with your sentiment there.
eIDAS can be used with the ID reader on Linux even, there's no lock out. They want to offer a convenient alternative for the normies, in a secure manner, I don't mind.
Edit: my 70 y/o mother even eIDAS authenticates (not germany, other EU country) on Linux Mint. There's no argument for lockout in my anecdotal perspective.
