Due to vulnerability in cryptographic key generation, Estonia canceled hundreds of thousands of national ID cards

In early November, the Estonian government suspended hundreds of thousands of national ID cards. They can be used as an identity card in everyday life, but the owners of these cards are denied access to electronic resources, the authentication procedure in which is carried out using the ID chip of the card. The problem is that when exploiting a cryptographic key vulnerability, an attacker can depersonalize the owner of this key.

Despite the fact that the vulnerability was discovered three weeks ago, Estonia decided to postpone the suspension of electronic systems, including voting systems. Local media claim that this was done in order to complete the election process without any problems, because they voted for the candidates using cards. If the country canceled their action before the election, then the latter would have to be recognized as invalid, which the government of the country did not agree to.

According to information security experts who discovered the vulnerability three weeks ago , its presence allows an attacker to crack a 1024-bit encryption key in just 25 minutes using a cloud-based instance. The price of hacking in this case costs $ 38. Hacking a 2048-bit key requires $ 20,000 and nine days.

Initially, the Estonian authorities stated that the vulnerability was not too dangerous, since its exploitation is a complex and expensive process. Representatives of the government apparatus stated the following: Large-scale attacks are unlikely due to the high cost of attack and the large amount of computing power to generate a private key. "

Affected smart cards company Gemalto , whose office is located in Switzerland. Its cards have been sold for more than ten years, they are used for two-factor authentication employees of Microsoft and other companies. One of these days it became known that the vulnerability that led to the suspension of Estonian maps existed since 2008.

spe information security experts Daniel Bernstein and Tanya Lange saidthat they were able to use a less expensive way to exploit the vulnerability than previously stated. In addition, this method is much faster than the one mentioned above. As far as one can judge, attackers can use the same method - often top-class professionals work in teams of cybercriminals.

According to the Estonian government, in order to avoid problems with cybersecurity, it was decided to suspend all digital IDs, both citizens and “electronic residents” until a new digital certificate is received that is not vulnerable. This is a precautionary measure that avoids the use by potential attackers of the data of citizens of the country.

In addition, the vulnerability is relevant not only in Estonia - as already mentioned above, Microsoft and other companies that use cards of the same manufacturer as those used for digital ID cards also change certificates. But Estonia is bigger than any corporation, so the problems here are more serious. “As far as we know, there are no cases of theft of electronic IDs, but ... this threat is real. By blocking card certificates, a country can be convinced of their safety, ”said the statement by Prime Minister Juri Ratas . He also added that the decision was not easy, but it was practically the only one of all possible.

The problem does not concern all digital IDs, but only those that were issued between October 16, 2014 and October 25, 2017. This number includes absolutely all cardselectronic residents , most of whom decided to use the opportunity of "digital citizenship" in order to open a new business.

Worst of all, the inhabitants of the country use digital certificates to receive medical services, interact with the tax service, payroll employees and other similar tasks. Cards can not be thrown away, but simply renew the electronic certificate that is contained in the chip. But when you consider that there are not so many centers, then at the same time hundreds of thousands of certificates are simply impossible to renew.

The decision of the government to suspend the operation of digital cards affected, in particular, companies that provide accounting services. And this happened just before the payment of wages and pensions. In the same period, employers transfer profit taxes to the treasury. Companies whose work is suspended due to problems with cards are unhappy.



“Of course, the state is to blame if an Estonian in his native country cannot understand what he needs to do. And the state just decides to stop the work of ID-cards, ” said Lars Petter Leinonen, Chairman of the Board of Leinonen Accounting Company.

The problem is irrelevant for mobiil-IDand cards issued before October 2014. Estonians change cards in two ways - electronically or in the police. According to the Department of State Information System (RIA), only 62,000 people renewed ID card certificates with security risk by Friday evening. Enormous lines lined up at the police departments. The government had to introduce a regime of 7/7 centers. That is, the centers work seven days a week.

According to information security experts, attackers can reduce the cost of decrypting the code, as well as reduce the time it takes to carry out this operation. If desired, cybercriminals can buy specialized hardware equipped with a GPU, programmers, specialized chips and independently create systems for the depersonalization of cardholders. Also, card information can be used during the same vote. Currently, the number of vulnerable cards is such that attackers can use the data of 10% of voters, or even more.

Estonian Prime Minister Juri Ratas said that a large number of people are working to eliminate the vulnerability of Estonian ID cards, and the solution to the problem is getting closer every day.

However, Estonia is far from the only country whose national maps are vulnerable to this vulnerability. A similar problem is relevant for Slovakia, where cybersecurity experts are now checking their own electronic country IDs.

Actually, the vulnerability is relevant for a large number of smart cards of a number of manufacturers. Most of the chips in these cards use the RSA encryption protocol. The way out may be to work with a different protocol. The Estonian government has stated that e-cards will soon be protected with elliptical cryptography .

The method of elliptic cryptography is to use the algebraic properties of elliptic curves. It was proposed in 1985 by Neil Koblitz and Victor Miller. In the method, the role of the main cryptographic operation is performed by the operation of scalar multiplication of a point on an elliptic curve by a given integer, determined through the addition and doubling of the points of the elliptic curve. The advantages of this method for the entire field of information technology are indisputable, since encryption of this type is fast, plus a small key length is used.

Regarding RSA, this cryptosystem is also quite reliable, since a composite number is quite difficult to factor into prime factors. But a manufacturer’s mistake, as in the case of Estonia’s ID cards, can simplify the task of decrypting secure keys. If we use algorithms on elliptic curves, then the possibility of using algorithms to solve the discrete logarithm problem in groups of their points is excluded. By the way, the NSA uses just the elliptic cryptography algorithms, protecting its documents with relatively short 384-bit keys. Perhaps the elliptic cryptography method will be used in the future instead of RSA.

As for Estonia, the government hopes to get everything back within a few days. In particular, this week renewed renewal of ID card certificates is renewed. This is the fastest way to avoid the need to visit map centers.