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Aachentoday at 4:47 PM1 replyview on HN

Needing to use a verified boot chain with keys that the bank trusts is essentially the same as using the authenticator device from said bank, except this one costs 100€ or more, has a microphone and camera built in, and you use it for private messages as well. That's not a future I want to live in

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


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microtonaltoday at 7:28 PM

Needing to use a verified boot chain with keys that the bank trusts is essentially the same as using the authenticator device from said bank,

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.)

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