Belgian electronic ID card and security

I received some feedback on my previous BeID post, where I explained how to log in to a remote system by use of your digital ID card.

Philip and Guy both claim it possible or likely that the crypto keys on eID cards are stored on a system of the government somewhere and that you therefore should not be using them.

I find this to be jumping the gun a little. Security is always a trade-off; indeed, if you want to hide stuff from the government, then using eID-based authentication might not be a very good idea. However, there are other cases where eID-based authentication really is the correct option; and it is nice to know that this kind of thing is possible. Security always is a trade-off; and if you make an informed choice, there's nothing wrong about giving someone else access to your server.

The fun bit is that Philip actually advocates carrying a clear-text printout of a list of still-valid passwords. Now that, I feel, is unacceptable, security-wise. Personally, I'd rather use a smartcard that only some secret government agency might be keeping copies of rather than a list that any random thief might make use of. The question really boils down to this, I think: how likely do you think it is that someone else will be able to get at your password by guessing or stealing it?

• Using a password that's related to your person or someone near you, or is based on a dictionary: rather likely. There are scripts out there that will guess these passwords. Don't use them.
• Using a printout of a list of one-time passwords: somewhat less likely (they can't be guessed by script), but still not very hard (wallets get stolen by the hundreds every day, and it usually takes a while before one notices)
• Using smartcards with keys generated by someone else: somewhat unlikely (there may be a few people who know my private key, but one can't be sure of that; and, color me naive, but I tend to trust the government to abide by its own laws—for the most part—laws that prevent this kind of behavior)
• Using strong password: rather unlikely, provided you take care of them.

What I mean by that last bit is that you should always generate your passwords with a tool that generates fully-random passwords ('pwgen -s', for example), and never write them down in cleartext anywhere. That of course makes it slightly hardish to memorize them; what I do is to store the password encrypted to my GPG key on my laptop, and I memorize the password by changing it on a remote server that I need to access fairly often (Debian's systems will do), but leaving my GPG passphrase and laptop password as is for the time being. Every time I need to log in to the remote server, I first try to remember the passphrase. If I can't remember it, I look it up in the encrypted file (again taking care not to store the file on disk). Once I start being able to log in to the remote server without having to look it up in the file, I change all my other passwords. This process usually takes a few weeks. Then, the only way someone can get my password is either by coercing me or by killing me and disecting my brain. And then still.

Unfortunately, in the real world, I realize that many people do not wish to go through all this trouble just to get a secure login, and instead just choose a weak password. I guess that's why I think the next best thing might be slightly better than using strong passwords...