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Comment by aloisklink | Hacker News Reader

The funny thing is, Estonia already has this feature in their ID cards (although, as I'm not Estonian, I'm not sure how often people actually use this feature).

https://learn.e-resident.gov.ee/hc/en-us/articles/3600006244...

Their ID cards can cryptographically sign documents/anything using a PIN that only the user should know, so even if the ID card is stolen, it still can't be used to sign documents/messages.

The problem is, the certificate (public key) purposely contains the full-name/public personal ID code, so that people can prove who (and which ID card) signed the message.

I'm unsure if making the photograph public was purposeful;, the Wikipedia article is quite vague (it says that "personal data" is publicly associated with your certificate, but I can't find whether photos are included under "personal data" on the English language government site).

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Since the Estonian ID-card infrastructure has been around almost 20 years (didn't even realize it's been this long already), it's used literally everywhere. Every time you interact with the government or a bank, utilities or even loyalty programs at stores, you'll use your digital ID.

These days, you also have the option of signing with Mobile-ID (using a secure SIM application provided by your phone carrier) or SmartID (a regular Android/iPhone app) are probably more convenient since you don't need the smart card reader.

I can't remember the last time I had to physically sign something in Estonia, only when dealing with foreign companies, where you need to pretend to print, sign & scan the document. They don't seem to mind copy-pasted PDF signatures though...

Oddly enough both of my leases in Estonia have wanted a hand-signed copy (though both times I also did the digital PDF signature). No clue why, but I can't remember anything else that ever has...

I'm an e-resident and we also get a digital ID. It uses 2 pin numbers, a normal pin and a second pin to sign stuff. Works great.

Estonian ID-cards contain 2 key pairs: authentication and signature. Certificates’ DN contain both: owner’s full name and Personal Code. Personal Code contains your sex and birth date. Also, there’s data file on chip containing all textual data seen on the card, no image. So it’s easy to use ID-card in both, physical stores (reads data file for Personal Code) and e-shops (reads certificate after auth). This document image service was just a convenience service to download your document image. Problem causing the issue was that auth certificate path was not verified during authentication, so you could impersonate by generating fake auth certificates.

AFAICT the photo service is a convenience feature for the user itself. When I use the ID-card desktop utility or the national web service it offers to show me my own photo. It may be used by govt agencies internally (and obv for issuing it) but I have yet to see an actual use case beyond showing it to myself.

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