This is vindicating. I suspect the vulnerabilities were caused by a requirement to align with the Global Platform specification they mention in their references

This is vindicating. I suspect the vulnerabilities were caused by a requirement to align with the Global Platform specification they mention in their references. Not sure that it prescribes AES-GCM, but I remember it being a bit janky at the time as they were trying to adapt protocols from smart card secure elements to mobile phones in a way that preserved compatability. The dodgy issue was that counters on slow low power card based secure elements were designed to depend on tamper proof hardware and had a small moving window, whereas in software, I'd speculate they needed something like GCM to maintain protocol backward compatability with some additional assurance in software. Modern protocols would just use ECC with a totally different protocol, but to maintain compatability for payments and global platform, you needed a symmetric protocol, and GCM was the best they could do. It's vindicating because when I worked on a related TZ problem almost 10y ago, the authors of this paper were the precise threat actor I proposed in the design discussions.