Comment by UltraSane

Comment by UltraSane 5 days ago

7 replies

Remote attestation absolutely provides increased security. Mobile banking fraud rates are substantially lower than desktop/browser banking fraud. Attestation is major reason why.

I think ever compute professional needs to spend at least a year trying to secure a random companies windows network to appreciate how impossible this actually is without hardware based roots of trust like TPMs and HSMs

garaetjjte 5 days ago

>Attestation is major reason why.

It's not. Mobile applications just don't have unrestricted access to everything in your user directory, attestation have nothing to do with it.

  • AnthonyMouse 5 days ago

    It's not even that. The main reason is probably that attackers are going to be writing code to automate their attacks, and desktops are easier to develop on than phones, so that's what they use with no reason to do otherwise.

    Even if you stopped supporting desktops, then they would just reverse engineer the mobile app instead of the web app and extract the attestation keys from any unpatched model of phone and still run their code on a server, and then it would show up as "mobile fraud" because they're pretending to be a phone instead of a desktop, when in reality it was always a server rather than a phone or a desktop.

    And even if attestation actually worked (which it doesn't), that still wouldn't prevent fraud, because it only tries to prove that the person requesting the transfer is using a commercial device. If the user's device is compromised then it doesn't matter if it can pass attestation because the attacker is only running the fake, credential stealing "bank app" on the user's device, not the real bank app. Then they can run the official bank app on an official device and use the stolen credentials to transfer the money. The attestation buys you nothing.

    • jofla_net 4 days ago

      All this theatre is turning out to be nothing more than giving up the agency we have today (nice things), for a risk averse kneejerk runaround with glaring ulterior motives...just like the scan your face+id push for services.

      • UltraSane 4 days ago

        Would YOU be willing to use a bank that refused to use TLS? I didn't think so. How is you refusing to accept remote attestation and the bank refusing to connect to you any different?