Estonia Blocked 760,000 National Electronic ID cards due to Critical Crypto Vulnerability Detected in ID Chip

The Republic of Estonia Decides to Cancel 50,000 ID cards issued starting from October 2014 due to potential Crypto vulnerability affecting the digital use of Estonian ID cards.

This critical flaw allows to clone the national Identity card of  Estonia by attackers and use it for forgery activities.

Theoretically, the reported vulnerability could facilitate the use the digital identity for personal identification and digital signing without having the physical card and relevant PIN codes.

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A Chipset called TPM which is chipsets manufactured by Infineon has Affected by this Crypto Bug and week generation of RSA cryptographic keys helps to attacker  Calculating the private RSA key for respective Public key that can be accessed by anyone as per the crypto system.

However Simply knowing the public key alone is not enough to unlock the card and calculating the private key but also need some powerful and expensive computing power to calculate the secret key and special custom-made software for signing are also needed.

Estonia Government Authorities  said, The possible vulnerability affects a total of almost 750,000 ID cards and all the cards will be suspended Until the certificates have been suspended or cancelled, nothing will change for the card holder. The ID card can be used as before.

Due to this Security flaw Estonians will be able to use the former “electronic” ID as a classic identification paper to prove their identity.

The solution is that all existing e-residents will need to update their certificates (once ready) using the ID card software on their computer.

Every digital ID card issued from November 2017 (including everyone now applying) will be unaffected by the security vulnerability.

A new ID card solution is being developed and applying for a new ID card will currently not fix the reported vulnerability. The ID card is still valid as proof of identity Officials said.

The new card receiving priority for 35,000 people, such as doctors, government officials working in the field of justice, as well as employees of the civil status office.