Several banks in Korea currently provide Firefox and Chrome plugins that implement one or another legally mandated crypto algorithm. Some of them even work on L

Several banks in Korea currently provide Firefox and Chrome plugins that implement one or another legally mandated crypto algorithm. Some of them even work on Linux. Thanks to Apple and Samsung, there have been a lot of demand for mobile e-commerce apps, and once you've ported your Windows crypto software to iOS and Android, it's not too difficult to port them again to OSX and Linux. As of 2012, the cross-platform online banking situation in Korea is not as bad as the article makes you believe, provided that you do business with a sensible bank. But the cipher is only one part of a very complicated situation. E-commerce in Korea is still very much crippled in non-Windows platforms, because: 1. In Korea, the standard way for individuals to authorize an online transaction is to sign it with an RSA key that is associated with an X.509 certificate that is issued by one of a handful of official bodies. (Korea was actually quite forward-looking when they made these rules. This was in the late 90s!) There are also detailed regulations about where in your Windows filesystem your keys can be stored. So there needs to be a graphical interface that displays all keys found in your filesystem, accepts a passphrase, produces a signed transaction in a certain format, and feeds it back to the web page you're on. That's a lot of work for a browser plugin to do, especially when you want to make it platform-independent. And we all know that the UI for client certificates is terribly broken in most browsers. 2. In addition, the client must be running a firewall software that meets certain requirements (Windows Defender doesn't qualify), as well as some sort of anti-keylogging software for the duration of the transaction processing (Big Bro looking after your own safety, how grateful). These rules were made because some lawmakers got scared by keyloggers or something. Not sure how effective they are, but most banks and online merchants supply these software as ActiveX controls. The thing is, you need administrator privileges in order to run firewalls and keyboard drivers. Even in Windows, online banking doesn't work unless you're using an admin account. I'm not sure whether this would be even possible with standard browser plugins on OSX and Linux. AFAIK, the consensus among Korean open-source developers seems to be that both requirements are completely pointless and therefore not worth trying to meet. As a result of these and other complications, most banks restrict non-Windows, non-IE clients to relatively harmless tasks like viewing your balance. If you want to engage in risky kinds of banking, like paying bills and sending money to other people, you must augment your supposedly inferior security with additional (again, legally mandated) protections, such as a one-time password generator. I actually think that this is headed in the right direction -- OTPs offer fantastic security -- but the current state of affairs makes non-IE users continue to feel like second-class customers. Even with an OTP, some tasks are still off-limits to Linux users.