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microtonaltoday at 7:28 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,

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.)


Replies

Aachentoday at 7:45 PM

That seems wrong. If malware can fake what the authenticator shows me, the authenticator is broken!

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

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