This does not work. You aren't talking about pissing off a significant percentage of the users who go elsewhere.
The imbalance in power is unthinkable to people 100 years ago when the phrase was first popularised.
Honestly, if the only way to secure your banking system is by locking down users' devices, there is something really bad going on at your end, security-wise. Your system should be secure even without locking down user hardware.
Once you have the attestation in place you have no guarantee who is going to get access to data like what apps are present on your device, and there will be nothing you can do to stop it.
Meanwhile, we could educate people against common scams.
How is this not just trading one smaller bad for a bigger bad? Why is this touted as an improvement?
I use a handheld card reader with a display as a 2FA for my bank transactions. It shows me the transaction and, after I confirm, sends a TAN to the bank. It is not a general-purpose device but a certified, tamper-evident/-resistant black box that does just that one thing.
> Meanwhile, we could educate people against common scams.
There's a million ways you can get scammed, no matter how many hours of training you've had.
This is a non-sensical remark because it's impossible to "prove" a counterfactual. I find stuff like this incredibly annoying - please don't say this.
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+b...
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.
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.
> 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.
What I'm claiming is that banks have the freedom of offering their customers 2FA other than smartphone apps.
> Do you even have a phone that does not support hardware attestation or is all this posturing about something hypothetical?
All the phones I own, including my daily driver, run some flavor of Debian. None of them support hardware attestation.
I'm in Europe, bound by PSD2, and own a couple of cheap, certified chip-and-TAN devices so I can do banking.
I think you're naively presuming the issue is simple and easy to address with a letter.
Regardless of your bank, payment systems such as Visa and Mastercard have blocked transactions involving mainstream online stores such as Steam because they unilaterally deemed some games to be problematic. You cannot fix this problem with an email.
The latter is absolutely a thing where customers can (and should IMO) push back hard.
Suppose someone invents a mind-reader that lets the user read the thoughts of anybody else in range. But the mind-reader requires great up-front costs to produce and also allows people with stronger readers to remotely destroy weaker readers, where strength is basically a function of cost.
In a vacuum, the mind-reader is "just a technology". But it aids autocratic surveillance much more than it aids citizens who want to surveill back. It's "neutral" but its impact is decidedly not.
TPMs and remote attestation enable entities with power to enforce their existing power much more effectively. In contrast, a general-purpose computer does the opposite because anybody can run whatever code they want, they can adversarially interoperate with anybody they feel like, and so on.
One of these is more evil than the other, even though they're both "just technologies".
We have over 30 years of the world wide web and for these more than 3 decades this was never a problem. Suddenly, we "need" to create new technology that seem to be security features, but are essentially just being used for evil, thus being inherently bad.
It's not like these technologies were created for the greater good and misappropriated by bad actors. They were proposed by bad actors in the first place, they cannot not be inherently good.
I don't think remote attestation (or even more so its umbrella technology, trusted computing) is nearly as specifically targeted as DRM.
> We have over 30 years of the world wide web and for these more than 3 decades this was never a problem. Suddenly, we "need" to create new technology that seem to be security features, but are essentially just being used for evil, thus being inherently bad.
I agree that requiring remote attestation for generic web use is evil. It's way too heavy-handed an approach better reserved
I still don't think this somehow outright disqualifies the technology itself.
captcha/spambots has been a problem since USENET
Are you seriously trying to suggest copyright infringement has not been an issue over the last 30 years? Both of them are solutions to problems that we've had over the last 30 years and were created for the greater good to solve problems that developers were facing.
DMCA is abused every. single. time.
Like literally hundreds of thousands, every day.
The policy is "I will not let you access this system unless your system software implements this technological protection."
A camera is technology. A security camera is policy, because it's a camera hooked up to policies on how to watch, record, and respond to what is required, and it is a political effort when connected with laws about face masks, prohibiting spray painting of the cameras, and allowing privacy intrusions.
People have woken up to the truth as the pieces come together.
This article from 2022 is fun to look at and see how prescient it was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29859106
A TPM with measured boot (SecureBoot) does exactly this, remote attestation is how Alice proves to Bob that it is in a trusted configuration and wasn't tampered with.
A TPM where the device owner can't take ownership of the root key is worse then no TPM at all.
(One argues that since you own both of them, you should simply set up the two servers yourself with a key of your own choosing, asymmetric or otherwise, and then restrict physical access to them.)
I can perhaps agree that the idea of SB can be good, but it was designed (and is used) in a bad way. Just look at how many distros do not support SB.