You're usually about 1 service away from realising that the "money you have" is just an int32, that, if everything works properly, you can modify.

Otherwise you have nothing except a pretty little plastic card.

(I'm aware that payments systems are not affected, but it's a sobering realisation that I've had a couple of times, but it works enough of the time that I forget about it... it's a bit like the meme about backups where a computer takes too long to boot, the person slowly builds panic and starts wishing they had backed up and published all their important work - then when the computer works they say "*phew*, thank god I don't have to do any of that".

MitID doesn't work on rooted android phones, or those running a custom rom. Reports from others who have disassembled it indicate that in fact a hard coded list of custom roms is checked against. It's a highly obsfucated binary, and by design is a single point of failure. If you sign in with an unauthorized device it helpfully centrally blacklists your IMEI. It's hard (but not impossible) to get a phone contract on Denmark without indirectly giving over your CPR number, so I imagine trying to get around this is frustrating. I didn't try and have a hardware dongle. One. By design, this whole system is a massive centralised single point of failure. It's absolutely key to Danish life.

That all said, most Danes would vigorously defend privacy, say that the state doesn't abuse its powers, and they're probably right. It's a very vivid vision of the 1960s Nanny State, where Nanny knows best and has your best interests at heart. Most of the time, she does. They're frequently voted as some of the happiest people on earth, so clearly the recipe of pay a ton of tax and get things from it works well. I find the privacy lack rather shocking and I've never got used to it -- in quite some ways it's an incredibly authoritarian society although no Dane would ever say that, and tell me to drink more øl and get off the internet and go for a walk in a forest. They point out that the UK has far more CCTV cameras and that we have more prosecutions for bent policemen and politicians. There's truth in all of this.

Either way, I'd be interested in seeing if they issue a post mortem on this. It'll cause a lot of issues for many, many people.

As a Dane, having lived in other countries, MitID is an insanely superior to anything I've ever tried. It simplifies so many touchpoints with the government, and is honestly such a good upgrade going from nothing -> physical NemID card with codes -> digital MitID (literally "My ID").

The only real disruption I'd say is if you happen to be buying something online that triggers the 3DS prompt (an additional security layer to prevent cards getting stolen/scam). In Denmark the 3DS prompt for VISA at least uses MitID to verify you are the owner of the card, so that'll obviously not work when MitID is down.

I'll say, it has been surprisingly stable though otherwise, and disruptions usually aren't a big impact (I literally wouldn't have known unless I saw this HackerNews post).

As for a centralized identity system: I personally see this as an acceptable contract for living in a society. Most countries have SSNs anyways, your taxes and many other things are tied to this. Centralizing this identity allows the government to streamline so many things to give a better service to their citizens. For example, all official communication goes to your "DigitalPost" email inbox, your verify identity with "MitID", and every person or company has a registered "NemKonto" tied to them for any salary or government payouts.

I maybe see people get tripped up at the concept that your government should actually care about the service they deliver. That's probably already the point where we diverge when talking about if these things are a good idea or not.

From a technical and user point of view, MitID have had less outages than Cloudflare, AWS and MS Azure in the last year. While I agree with the single point of failure, I also like that I setup my startup with all government and banking online via a login I had the last decade, painless and faster than most places without having to upload a single document in many a unsecured ways I heard from my US and Other European friends (outside the Nordic countries).

Yes we Danes trust our institutions more than others and trust is given by default and then lost, rather then "earned" (I would argue bought) in other places.

Liberal democracy is a very young experiment and people do not realise how fragile it is. In the 1940s less than 10% of countries were democratic, and we could go back there again easily.

Would be cool if multiple actors were allowed and shared the same kind of auth signing method so that there aren’t just one point of failure. Or something distributed like a blockchain type of signing method, at least I don’t think Bitcoin or Ethereum have downtime that often, and authorization should probably be read heavy only to check if some identity is still allowed

I converted this to a Tell HN post since there didn't seem to be a good 3rd party article about it in English (yet, at least). The submitted link is in the toptext. (Submitted title was "MitID, Denmarks sole digital ID, has been down for over an hour and counting".)

(p.s. In case anyone is wondering, I think this was a good submission with aspects worth discussing. It set off the flamewar detector, so I turned that off and re-upped the post a bit.)

The way TLS on the Web works is better: as long as the CA is up some time during the period I need to renew it is fine. Digital IDs should really work that way (probably with relatively short life spans just like let's encrypt: the digital ID could need to be renewed once a week for example, and it would opportunisticly renew when less than half the time is left).

Electricity isn't guaranteed.

Smartcards / YubiKeys.

Never understood the logic for these to be centralised / online.

I am surprised this is even a frontpage topic, 3 years after it was rolled out, we saw downtime every week or so. So much so that we implemented automatic pop ups for our customers, and no on-call, signaturgruppen a subsidiary of NETS didn't even file this incident as a major outage lol. There is also no alternative, you simply can't access banking apps without MitID, so without it people in Denmark are just screwed, 3D Secure (online payments doesn't work for most merchants), login to government and banking sites doesn't work.

The main issues are that we have a central provider NETS whom are known for NemID its predecessor, and card payments in Denmark. They're huge in this space, at least for Denmark.

The government and the banks wanted more control over MitID, so the responsibility was split between the major banks, Digitalstyrelsen (the government), and NETS.

Basically, customers, middle man and NETS the vendor.

It was truly a shit show. The middleman (Digitalstyrelsen - Agency for Digital Government was technically illiterate, either by contract, or because they wanted to be in control, had inserted themselves in-between customer and vendor, and now we suddenly couldn't provide feedback, or talk to the vendor at all, this meant that the vendor had full control over how they interpreted the contract.

During development they shipped a version of the product that had a single flag set to false, preventing a login. NETS weren't allowed to ship a fix for this for 3 months. Many of the customers had to use burp suite during their testing simply to progress with development.

Finally when the vendor had "delivered" to their contract, the customer was sitting back with a half-baked product, and because it was Digitalstyrelsen that was the primary arbiter of whether they'd fulfilled the contract, NETS got away with having delivered at that point 1 year past schedule.

I've never had so many support tickets. For such a technically tiny product, we saw so much trouble getting people to use MitID over NemID. It was incredible.

What is even more insane is that each provider implementation of MitID is technically an independent implementation, some are React, Preact (if using nets provided version), etc. All the providers have to provide a pixel perfect replication to be allowed to issue MitID credentials.

Also this was designed when OAuth was really hot, so most implementations are like 3 levels deeply nested of OpenID Connect and OAuth2, it gets pretty nuts.

Talk about an amount of wasted effort.

As with many other huge projects especially government lead. It is just a big power play, and as it turns out, power wins. In this case NETS.

Are we seeing the same in Denmark/Greenland with the USA?

[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2022/7335... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Ukraine_cyberattacks