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For those who are not familiar with the Danish citizen register: Basically it's an ancient system made way before computers were a thing and it's just not been updated to modern standards because politicians never prioritize things before they blow up in their face.
The crux of the issue: In Denmark, your personal ID is not just an ID, it is also an access token. So you need to keep your ID number secret, otherwise others can use it to look up your personal information. Like, imagine your username was also your password, that's how dumb this system is. Add to this the fact that certain private companies get priveliged access to the citizen register for reasons and anyone with a few braincells could predict this happening 20 years ago.
Haha I work in German government IT and have a colleague who likes to point to Denmark as an example for how good things could be here. I'll show him this next time he needs to put down the rose glasses.
That said, it's the same in Germany, only that citizen data is kept with municipalities, so we have ca. 11.000 different such shitty systems built decades ago instead of one - which makes it less attractive and damaging to compromise any given one, I guess.
At least, however, we don't have a citizen ID such as the one you describe, that could be used to identify people uniquely.
OK, so you forgot the Sozialversicherungsnummer and the Steuer-ID?
They are not really the same though. These are domain specific identities. Sure, the tax office has your tax ID. But your municipality, the state health authorities or the retirement insurance will never ask you your tax ID, don't have access to it and are not allowed to process it. It's not a citizen ID that can be used to link different data sets and it's not saved in the Melderegister.
With NOOTS Germany will move toward a less decentralized service with municipalities being able to share data between them more easily. I hope though that BSI pressures for it to be secure by modern standards.
Oh don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with a citizen ID. Actually a citizen ID is very useful. It should just only be an ID and shouldn't give any access.
Depends how much you trust the state. After the Nazi period, the German state is actually not allowed to keep persistent identifiers on people. You can only identify any. given citizen through a domain ID that may not be shared or used beyond a specific domain (e.g tax ID) or a combination of changeable attributes (address, name, etc.).
In practice this can be annoying, but it's also a useful precaution to prevent the government form easily pooling and linking information on citizens across domains and levels of state.
If you were to combine those two pieces of information, you could definitely identify a person unambiguously. Just because our government is too incompetent to combine the information doesn’t mean hackers won’t do it. But soon we’ll have the centralized BundID—to make things easier for hackers.
I know and what I'm sayin is that this is by design. It's not only about competence, competence can be bought. It's structurally difficult because various different ministries and independent bureaucracies would need to decide to cooperate and do tedious work to combine data sets like this. It's not a magical antidote but a structural impedance that is supposed to make abuse more difficult, obviously not impossible.
And BundID does not entirely change to his. BundID does not assign you a unique identifier either. You get a temporary process-based ID that is generated as you apply for a government service and that is forwarded throughout the process. BundID itself only has a basic user name that you pick yourself and that is not used or stored anywhere outside it. The actual authentication is done via the eID, Elster certificate, etc. which all don't leave cryptographic traces.
Don't get me wrong, this system is still kind of broken. BundID still bundles important information in a central location and urgently needs modernization. And it's authentication amounts to 'trust me bro' from the POV of any other government service. But it does not introduce a global unique identifier either.
In Sweden this info is public. Same ID format, but just using your name I can find out everything about you.
Well and the number space is your birthday and then 4 digits... But ending in odd numbers for men and even for women.
So it was already not very secure considering there's numerically only 5000 options once you know almost anything about a person you want to target.
That's only a problem because it is used as a password. If it was actually just a pure ID and didn't give access to any information, then it wouldn't matter. Okay, you could guess my ID if you had my birthdate - so what? The ID is useless, it's just an ID.
Yes of course.
I also don't understand why MitID got rid of username/password before phone authentication (like nemID had).
That was a bit of a regression
MitIDs password that doubles as an ID has also always been super weird to me. No idea why they did it like that.
Maybe so you don't need to remember both a username and a password? But that's such a pathetic reason.