I don't agree that it is stupid. Both banking on a Windows PC or on an unlocked + rooted phone is potentially catastrophic. Windows because of the prevalence of malware, unlocked phones with custom AOSP forks because people download 'ROMs' (as they call them) from the most shady sites.
Once 10,000s of Euros are siphoned from a bank account, it's usually the bank that has to deal with the mess. Especially if they cannot prove the transactions were done in on an insecure platform.
Phones are generally safer (though there is a huge variance between the safety of different Android phones) because they use verified boot and strong application sandboxing.
I think it is possible to believe the following two things a the same time:
- Banking apps should only run on locked phones with secure boot.
- Banking apps should not be limited to the Apple/Google duopoly.
The solution is that there is some validation of alternative OS vendors, e.g. in the form of an audit, and that banks are required to approve apps on their platforms after the audit. This would be fairly straightforward tech-wise, because e.g. GrapheneOS supports remote attestation, but banking apps need to add/allow the hashes of the official boot keys: https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...
We have secure hardware already, it's called a smartcard and is what you find in all bank cards, SIM cards, authenticator devices... my phone is my phone, not a second factor, or at least I (as a hacker/tinkerer) don't want it to be that way, just like with my desktop which is also not the bank's to mandate whatever from
Somehow they got the memo for devices where it is normal to have admin permissions, but for mobile devices the two big tech companies successfully scaremongered non-techies
It's not, because even though the authenticator is secure, you are entering the auth codes in a browser in general purpose desktop OS with (if you use Windows or desktop Linux) little to no sandboxing outside the browser. You are one malware app (or NodeJS package for tech users who claim they'll never download malware) for your session getting hijacked.
The sad reality is that phones (and some tablets) are the only relatively secure computing environments that we have. Thanks to Windows with it decades of piled up legacy and Linux with large sandbox and secure boot-hating parts of its community, we cannot have nice things.
(The part about the Linux community, which I'm also part of is a generalization, but the hostility against Flatpak, secure boot, etc. is pretty big.)
It doesn't matter what device relays the code I typed over or otherwise transmits the approval through untrusted networks to the server
> The sad reality is that phones (and some tablets) are the only relatively secure computing environments that we have
My bank('s authenticator hardware) begs to differ
That's not what I am saying. The authenticator is irrelavant to this attack. If your machine is compromised by malware, the malware could take over the browser session, regardless of how you log in.
Phones are better protected against persistent malware because every application is sandboxed (harder to escalate) and much more of the boot chain/OS is validated (harder to persist).