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Look at the last 30 years of computing history? When online banking was first created it was an absolute chaos zone. Everyone was accessing it from desktop mac
by mike_hearn 6mo ago
Look at the last 30 years of computing history?
When online banking was first created it was an absolute chaos zone. Everyone was accessing it from desktop machines riddled with viruses and malware. There are endless stories of being discovering their life savings had been wired to Belarus by some malware running on their machine that had grabbed their banking credentials when they logged in.
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Akrebsonsecurity.com+banking+malware https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Akrebsonsecurity.com+b...
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/07/how-a-citadel-trojan-developer-got-busted/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/07/how-a-citadel-trojan-dev...
> U.S. prosecutors say Citadel infected more than 11 million computers worldwide, causing financial losses of at least a half billion dollars.
Half a billion dollars, by a single guy with a single virus!
Different parts of the world came up with different solutions for this. The US made all ACH payments reversible and international wires difficult, but that just meant the receiver paid for fraud instead of the person whose machine was full of viruses. This was an obviously bad set of incentives and hacky panic-based fix. Banks elsewhere in the world settled on providing users with authenticator devices that looked like small calculators into which you could type transaction details after plugging in a smart card. Malware could still steal all your financial data but it couldn't initiate transactions.
Obviously, all this was a hack. What was needed was computers that were secure. Apple and the Android ecosystem eventually delivered this, and the calculator devices were retired in favour of smartphones with remote attestation. This was better in literally every way, for 100% of users. Firstly, it protects financial privacy and not just transaction initiation. Secondly, it's a lot more convenient to use a device that's always with you than a dedicated standalone single-use computer. Thirdly, adding remote attestation made no difference because that's what the calculator devices were doing anyway. Fourthly, even in the case of customers of small American banks that weren't capable enough to manage dedicated hardware rollouts, getting rid of fraud instead of pushing liability around allows for lower prices and fewer headaches.
So remote attestation is a non-negotiable requirement for digital banking of any form. When Microsoft didn't deliver most banks preferred to literally manufacture and sell their customers single-use smartcards that remotely attested by you manually copying numbers back and forth between screens. Or they hid the cost of rampant fraud in the price of other services until such a time that Apple/Google saved them.
- Hackbraten 6mo ago> Secondly, it's a lot more convenient to use a device that's always with you than a dedicated standalone single-use computer. The price the owner pays for this is that they're locked out of their own expensive general-purpose computing device while still having to bear all the inconveniences (babysit OS updates, configure stuff, keep it charged, have the battery fail, buy a new device every five years, etc.) In the meantime, the standalone chip-and-TAN device costs 30 bucks, is powered by three AAA batteries that hold their charge for five years, lives for 20 years, and never needs a single software update. I'd choose the small single-purpose device over the enshittified, locked-down smartphone every single time.
- ogogmad 6mo agoThis reminds me of crypto wallets. I also dispute mike_hearn 's: > Smartphone HW attestation is better in every way They're still prone to side-channel attacks like SPECTRE. Crypto wallets are practically immune because they're air-gapped. [edit] I just realised that's Mike Hearn of early BTC fame. I suppose he would know what a crypto wallet is.
- mike_hearn 6mo agoSpectre doesn't work across process boundaries, so I don't think they are. You can't Spectre your way into a banking app on an iPhone. Or if you can I'd like to see it in action.
- ogogmad 6mo agoI don’t think "Spectre doesn’t work across process boundaries" is correct as stated; cross-process and cross-security-domain Spectre attacks have been demonstrated. But I agree that "a malicious app can trivially Spectre its way into an arbitrary banking app on a patched iPhone" is a much stronger claim, and I’m not aware of a public demonstration of that exact attack. My point is only that process isolation alone is not, in principle, a complete answer to Spectre-class attacks.