Dont take the fact that Wero still works for Bunq as an indicator that ASN or any other bank are doing something especially untowards.
Given Bunq's abysmal security track record it probably means they just forgot to enforce some policy that Wero requires on mobile devices - no matter how annoying these "no grapheneOS" policies are in general, of course.
I can't take bunq seriously because every time I approve a direct debit I keep seeing two transactions in the log -- one already processed and another still pending and also asking me to enter the pin again after it was approved.
SafetyNet was a mistake in general. But banks specifically are among the most obnoxious shitters when it comes to "you aren't allowed to do things except the way we want it".
Over and over again you have to contend with bullshit like 120MB APKs full of obfuscated code, root detection, custom firmware detection, "non-mainstream device" detection, VPN detection, and even more obscure spyware-flavored functionality.
By now, if a major regulator like EU steps in, cracks the whip, and forces banks to provide access through a common API standard to any third party banking app? I'd welcome the change.
Not sure what you mean. This should be the default for most things. Giving corps levers to abuse the users/consumers is going to result in exactly that.
As Dunning said and Marx quoted:
> "With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent. will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent. certain will produce eagerness; 50 per cent., positive audacity; 100 per cent. will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent., and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged."
Open banking isn’t mandatory. Psd2 and successors are. But it does not require the banks to expose feature parity APIs so others can replicate their apps.
AFAICT, psd2 should be sufficient to do the most elemental of banking features. See transactions and initiate them.
Exactly, it's an utterly ludicrous state of affairs that I'd have to give access to a third party to my freaking bank details. And this is treated as some kind of success?
One of my agents has (read only) access to my accounts. I do it via Era, which is quite good, though expensive (they try to justify this with other functionality, but they provide nothing my agent can't do itself other than the API access).
To provide me with API access to my own accounts, Era goes through another third party provider which again connects to my bank. I guess they could eventually get direct connections themselves.
So instead of me get convenient read-only access to my bank, I've ended up giving two separate third party providers credentials I'd prefer they didn't have.
All I'd need was an automated way to get a CSV or JSON dump of my transactions and I'd have been happy, but none of my banks support that without manually logging in. It's infuriating.
There is bunq, which offers a full API for regular users, including a web hook call in case of new transactions. Made me actually switch to them. Super nice so far.
I don't know if there is a common API standard from a technical point of view, but there is the legal framework for it. Banks in the the EU have to provide an access to third parties who provide account information services to clients (themselves being regulated and supervised by a national agency). I would assume because it is mandatory, it is in the interest of banks to share costs and provide a single unified technical API, since they all have to spend the money anyway.
People need to stop calling for the EU "to step in", they already have and made everything worse. They forced PSD2 with """"""""""""""Open Banking""""""""""""""" which requires convoluted requirements and is regulated to death so no private person can call the API themselves and get e.g. their balance or transactions.
I like complaining about it too, but it's still a massive step forward from how things were before, where I had no access. Now I at least have access even if it involves going via third parties.
How is that worse? It's only "open" in the sense that other licensed businesses can provide services that integrate with your bank account, but it didn't take anything away.
I also consider restrictions against open source
to be malicious acts - hence also malware, such
as by banks and other companies. Or, worse,
government agencies. In a local medical university
in central Europe, for instance, we are required
to either have a Google account or a Microsoft
account - usually the latter, to access emails.
More it was the banks were made liable for stolen funds. So they responded by making funds harder to steal.
Do you really think banks care about you installing custom themes or whatever? They only care because the cracked Spotify app also has malware bundled on the side which uses the new root access to break the app sandboxes.
Yeah, you’re right man. The bank is just hell bent on stopping you from using GrapheneOS just because they’re in the pocket of Big Google or whatever. It’s gotta be malice. It’s not about liability at all.
I'm convinced the Amazon Fire Phone was the motivation for SafetyNet.
The Fire Phone was a midrange Android phone from 2014 preloaded with Amazon's app store and services instead of Google's. It failed on its own merits, but I think Google got scared someone else would do a better job. The barrier to entry is a lot higher if most people can't use their banking app on it.
I'd really love to see your banking app that works differently and cannot super trivially be attacked by malicious software. Can you show us your example of such an app? It might be helpful to show tha validity of your arguments.
> Over and over again you have to contend with bullshit like 120MB APKs full of obfuscated code, root detection, custom firmware detection, "non-mainstream device" detection, VPN detection, and even more obscure spyware-flavored functionality.
I keep seeing people say this, and it keeps being true that you can just go to your bank's website and do whatever it is you want to do.
Most European banks either don't have a web banking at all, or require a mobile app to log into it. There are exceptions but they are rare and becoming even rarer.
In Thailand pretty much all of the banks are shutting down their websites. App only, typically requiring visiting a branch to register the app on your phone, blocking screenshots, and often blocking vpn or 1.1.1.1 access. :-(
I've used smile since 2004. It has an app which is fine, or I use the webpage which has more choice. I used HSBC before then which had a web interface, I vaguely remember natwest had special software for computer banking in the 90s, that might have been business accounts only, and potentially even was dialing direct to their systems rather than via the internet.
There are app only banks, you make your choice and you pay your price.
Safetynet was not a mistake; it was a lock-in mechanism. Widespread failure to call it out as such and oppose it as happened when Microsoft proposed something similar for PCs a decade earlier[0] was the mistake.
> will this mean we have to support one more standard, one more release channel, one more modified OS?
Android apps don't have to take any active steps to support third-party distributions. All they have to do is refrain from taking active stops to block them, but I suspect you knew that.
> banks specifically are among the most obnoxious shitters when it comes to "you aren't allowed to do things except the way we want it"
Since this post is about a Dutch bank, I think it's important to add some nuance to this. In the Netherlands, banks have pretty much been made responsible for any money a client loses that a bank could have theoretically prevented. This includes people wiring their life savings to someone who pretended to be a bank employee or police officer. This has become a massive cost to banks over here and they're trying to do anything to prevent this.
Right now, I need to wait 4 hours before I can increase the maximum amount I can transfer through internet banking. Want to buy something expensive and you forgot to do this? Too bad, try again in 4 hours.
> forces banks to provide access through a common API standard
I think this is good actually. We have taken the convenience vs security trade off too much towards the former either because or due to how busy and intense life is nowadays. Waiting 4hr to make a big purchase should almost never be a problem.
I recently had a family member with a medical emergency in a foreign country with only 1 direct flight to cross an ocean, and there was a narrow window of time to buy the very limited supply of lie flat seats needed to make the trip so medical care could be resumed as quickly as possible.
It was nice to be able to spend $30k+ on short notice. With modern security features, there is no need to enforce an arbitrary time limit if the payer accepts the risks.
What exactly do you mean by sending that $30k at your own risk? Like are you suggesting if you sent it to the wrong entity (say they turned out to be a scammer) and the bank shrugged, you'd be fine with it because you took the risk? If yes, do you think most people would? I feel like most people expect more safeguards and recourse when the transaction amount is higher, not less.
No, the banking system just runs so perennially behind the times that they suffer from baroque issues that no one else has had in 20 years.
Eg the above example; how is it possible to send money without knowing who the other side is? I can trivially look up a domain name and see registration info, I can look up the IP to see who it’s registered to, I can check certs to see if they’re valid and legit.
It’s bizarre how normal we think it is to send large sums to random strings of digits that we think are Amazon or the IRS with basically 0 way to validate them.
I bought a house in cash and putting the money in escrow was unbelievably stressful. They send me numbers, on a printout that’s a scan of a scan of a scan with text that says “call to make sure this is still the right account number”, and a bajillion warnings to make sure the number is right or vague and terrible things might happen.
Insanity that I can get insanely complicated gadgets shipped to my house in 4 hours but we don’t have a better way to move 6 figure sums than “double check your numbers”.
In Finland at least there’s now recipient (name) verification, so it absolutely can be done. When you transfer money to someone, it will check your input against the true account holder and will warn if they don’t match. You can ignore the warning at your own peril.
That seems like a big regression versus a paper check. With a check I can “spend” the money immediately, or at least commit to spending it. It isn’t deducted until the check clears (which is a pain) but I don’t have to wait around for 4 hours apologizing to the seller until I’m allowed to transfer my own money.
This reads like you’ve never made a large purchase outside of the internet. I don’t know why you’d advocate for this except to be contrarian.
> By now, if a major regulator like EU steps in, cracks the whip, and forces banks to provide access through a common API standard to any third party banking app? I'd welcome the change.
"Open banking" is kind of a thing with PSD2/PSD3, but in name only. In reality, it's impossible to build anything useful. Interacting with any of the "open" APIs requires approval from a national bank (or similar institution), which means there are many hoops to jump through.
There is only one bank I know of that offers an API for end users ("bunq" IIRC). Every other god damned bank insists on being user hostile.
> "Open banking" is kind of a thing with PSD2/PSD3, but in name only. In reality, it's impossible to build anything useful
You mean the step from sandbox to production application, or you're not even getting access to the sandbox itself? I managed to get sandbox access with ease via two separate banks (both Spanish though), with no problems, think it took them one (working) day or something to review my "application". I never tried to get anything into the production environments though, but makes sense they'd be a bit tighter on that tbh.
Because these API are not meant to be public for the end user to use.
Access to that kind of data requires regulation, a lot of it and that's why Third Party Providers exist. There are a lot of them in Europe and they're not expensive.
I actually didn't expect to find anything about bunq around here but I have to say they're the worst bank I've worked with. When we started working with them, their API were broken and the devs had no idea why. It seems to have improved recently but it's definitely not a bank to praise for their API.
> Because these API are not meant to be public for the end user to use.
I know, that's my point. It's a stupid decision.
> Access to that kind of data requires regulation
It's my data. I want to access it how I see fit.
> There are a lot of them in Europe and they're not expensive.
I already have a bank and I already pay them. I don't want to pay anyone else to be able to use my bank account in a way that suits me. Sadly, there aren't many good options.
Someone mentioned Wise, and they do seem pretty interesting. But it makes no sense why common high strees banks refuse to cater to power users, or even to users who aren't using mainstream devices.
It ain't your data, it's the bank's data about you. Banks are shitty about access, APIs because they are perpetually in CYA mode from KYC/AML rules from the US (also on most foreign banks) and GDPR and cousins in Europe.
I was actually surprised how many bank apps will work under GrapheneOS even if only partially.
In Hungary you don't get documentation for these APIs only in pdfs via email, and if you get it the APIs are not stable, constantly breaking. I was always dreaming about creating an automated testing suite and report all of the issues automatically to the national bank, which is the supervisor of all commercial banks in HU, in a hope to punish them.
Seriously, count your blessings man. In America we only get Plaid, which only works right or reliably for big banks (which are also the worst ones), and it isn’t an API for humans, just a paid SaaS product that a company who wants to offer integration with banks has to pay (i assume a lot) for.
Two immediate options exist:
- Crew (unofficial, but blessed, SDK)
- Mercury (official)
Neither are technically a bank, but provide banking services. Mercury is more focused on big earners, and Crew is focused more on budgeting. Both have pretty extensive API surfaces.
>I was always dreaming about creating an automated testing suite and report all of the issues automatically to the national bank, which is the supervisor of all commercial banks in HU, in a hope to punish them.
Whilst not PSD2/PSD3, I've been super happy with Wise; an excellent API, good quality docs. A _proper_ test environment that you can drive using hooks they expose. Nothing but praise for them, including their support, which has helped me around the clock even on weird questions such as why my custom integration fails to send a transaction (mismatched currency between recipient and transfer in my code).
Not going to be a good day when Wise or Plaid are breached and accounts start being drained. Adding middlemen is not a solution to poor banking services.
I've actually been very successful in building a Home Assistant integration for my bank, built on PSD2.
Approval took 4 days, after that I had production access.
It's not that bad. Obviously you get Design By Committee problems, but better than no API.
In the UK, you do require an FCA registration to access Open Banking APIs, but I built an open-source client (in production) that handles a lot of the API integration work: https://github.com/finlabsuk/open-banking-connector
Oh, the horror! The digital pacifier does not work on this weird cheap phone
Normies don't understand the that any computer should be able to run software from any other computer. They dont get the idea of the general purpose computer. They've bought into the idea of computers-as-appliances sold by steve jobs and others.
The executives you're talking about don't see an issue with this. Their solution for this is the same as everything else: spend more money and buy another device. User freedom does not even enter the equation.
If they identify as a normie or an appliance peddler who is offended by the tone suggesting computers "should" be general purpose?
Or they are offended by the implication that said normies are perhaps unable to understand this lost potential, rather than making principled choices to embrace the appliance shlock?
They can use it however they want. Similarly, technically advanced users should be extended the same courtesy. As it stands, devices like iphones and etc are build to exclusively cater to "appliance operator". This limits the technical user, whereas if they were left as general purpose devices, they could cater to both parties equally.
Yes, and it's even worse than that. Phone, tablet, TV box manufacturers now routinely lock the bootloader of the devices they make. This means that even if you are willing to sacrifice device attestion for the sake of freedom, you can't replace the firmware/OS, unless some exploit or other workaround is found. These corporations treat the device as a storefront from which to extract additional revenue and spy on their customers for their benefit. It's truly shocking, and Apple convinced normies that it's normal.
Don't think this would work as well as you think it would. One of the privileges of being an executive is that you basically have unlimited access to money so their kids are playing roblox on ipads (each kid has their own).
It reminds me of this time I learned for the first time about heated driveways so I was talking to my coworker and friend about how if I was a multimillionaire, I would have one of those things and I would never have to shovel snow again. He replied by saying I don't understand how being a multimillionaire works.
A simple millionaire hires people to shovel snow. A multi-millionaire doesn't even think about such trivialities as snow, because their assistant has a budget and proactively makes sure the property is always taken care of. (Or more likely, they live somewhere where it never snows anyway.)
I live in a country where it basically never snows and until I got to the 'never have to shovel snow again' part of your comment I was so confused about why someone would want a heated driveway. I was thinking 'do rich people like to walk around barefoot outside their home or something?'.
So anyway, maybe the cheaper solution to your snow problem is to move here to Ireland :D
Yes, but in this reality that I just developed the executive only get old phones they have to flash with custom ROMs which need weird kernel hacks to hide the fact that they lack attestation support from Roblox.
I fucking hate rublox for this. My children are not allowed to play this game for other reasons so the problem solved itself.
I like reusing old phones with custom ROMs.. it makes so much sense not to produce more waste.
I believe the fit is so poor that google should really object to it. I already refuse to make youtube videos because I need my gmail account.[1] If I need my google account for my ID and my payments I cant use gmail.[2] I also don't need Google ads badly enough.
It doesn't take a lot of stupid to lose the account but ANY account activity at all may trigger false positives.
In theory the US government can seize EU google accounts. Given time I'm sure we can find even crazier rulers than Ursula and Donald combined.
[1] - I got one flag for a 10 min video including 10 sec of 1991 footage from a local NZ news agency credited both in the video and linked in the description.
[2] - I've already lost my account once temporarily for jokingly hitting reply-all without looking how many cc's there were.
Nah SafetyNet offloaded a huge chunk of security on Android from app makers to Google/AOSP, it's an excellent system that works great for 99.99% of uses. It's what allows safe and fast banking on Android in general.
It's an excellent system that forbids up-to-date open source systems, but is completely ok with systems that are several years behind in security patches.
It's just a way for app makers to point their finger at someone else.
It's a system that allows even those old systems to still use banking reliably and securely, so yeah I'd say it's an excellent system. As far as GrapheneOS goes - now that they're partnered with Motorola they might actually get some certification, along with a proper security audit from Google. Not sure what the details of the supported functionality are gonna be there.
Older Android phones that haven't received security updates for two years are not secure. The Play Integrity check therefore does not mean that the phone is secure, but only that it is a certified smartphone that came with Google services preinstalled.
> It's a system that allows even those old systems to still use banking reliably and securely
This is the crux of your entire argument, so you kind of need to actually substantiate it. Does Play Integrity catch an app from to Play Store using an exploit against a comically ancient vendor kernel to do anything it wants? How?
An immutable OS install and app sandboxing by default provide a lot of security. Those are present on third-party Android distributions that don't pass SafetyNet. Some users of those add root access so they can let a handful of apps out of the sandbox, but I'm willing to bet most of those are tech experts with better security habits than the average person.
Show me examples of actual data breaches and account takeovers SafetyNet would have stopped if you really want to defend this position.
Instead of asking the government to fit all banks' products to your preferences, you could just use a bank that fits your preferences.
I use legacy banks for some stuff (typically things that require underwriting), and neo-banks EMI's for things where legacy banks just don't move fast enough (cross boarder transactions, shared accounts, automations).
> you could just use a bank that fits your preferences.
you assume this exists / can exist
(for a given set of reasonable requirements which aren't yours)
but various "practices" and "regulations" for software security push banks into the direction of such nonsense, so if a major reasons this is happening is the government asking them to fix it is very reasonable
similar in other context where that argument is often used you have problems like monopolies, collusive agreements or various source pushing companies into acting collectively user hostile weather it's laws or other reasons
the government fixing such things by changing laws/regulations is pretty much the only things which can work in many cases
this doesn't mean they have to tell companies exactly what to do, instead they (should) find out what pushes things in bad directions and then "counter balance it" in some form or way
Why would banks be motivated to care? People just give them money as a business model. Up until recently, Wells Fargo didnt have case sensitive passwords even, because no pressure to do anything about that.
To bring it around - the Non-Google android user base is small enough right now that there is no motivation for them to spend money to make their verification/validation stuff work on any non-mainstream platforms.
Unfortunately, banks can be held liable for customers getting scammed. Even if they win in the end, they have to make the customer whole first no matter what [1].
And you don't think that plays some part in all these arcane security requirements that basically amount to "you're doing something a little weird so we're just going to block you rather than support it"?
The same banks that typically embrace the 3 biggest signs of security stupidity:
- max length of passwords (not talking about lengths that would pose a DoS threat, talking limits like 20 characters)
- incredibly constrained character set for passwords (“your password can’t contain a quotation mark, only alphanumeric and these specific 10 punctuation marks”)
- “security” questions (can we just ban these already? Knowing that my childhood dog’s name was Bingo should NOT give you the ability to change my brokerage password.)
They are breaking the law, that should be motivation enough. That the number of non android non ios users is small shouldn't be relevant. The locked down android and apple devices are like virtual US soil. The obligation should be to service all EU citizens rather than a sub set.
Mostly the government forces them to do this. If the capability did not exist it wouldn't be mandated or used. Think about this whenever someone tells you "just don't use it if you don't like it", about everything.
EU has PSD2 which enforce good, strong rules on customer authentication. For example, banks must have two-factor authentication. And if both factors live on the same phone, the bank has to safeguard against that phone being compromised. Hence the root detection and app-integrity checks that he is complaining about.
But what's tragic is that instead of understanding the problem, which is partly driven by regulation and mostly not even a problem, he calls for more government regulation. What a mess.
I'm not saying that crypto currencies are the solution to everything wrong with the banking system, but if you have crypto at Binance you do in fact not own any crypto at all and are literally using them as a bank, just an unregulated one. You get the worst of both worlds.
When you actually own your crypto currencies because you have the keys Binance cannot give away your money to North Koreans.
> Over and over again you have to contend with bullshit like 120MB APKs full of obfuscated code, root detection, custom firmware detection, "non-mainstream device" detection, VPN detection, and even more obscure spyware-flavored functionality.
When you work in a regulated industry, you have to get pentests. The pentesters come with a list of "recommended best practices" to harden / secure your apps, which always include all of the user hostile bullshit you mentioned.
It's a finding if they're not implemented. Even if the dev team doesn't want to implement these things they get forced to by policy and the overall process :/
The only way this can NOT happen is if someone quite senior signs off on the risk, who would have to get in a big fight with the cyber/policy teams for basically no benefit to themselves. They would also have to be unusually technical and pro freedom to even understand the issues, which is not the typical personality profile of the kind of executive who ends up with overall risk authority for a bank's mobile app.
yeah, there are a lot of bad auditors in all kinds of ways, mostly:
- auditors which commonly "pass" things which should be flagged, but happen to be a more expensive then normal industry standard in ways which should make them non-competive but somehow they get hired a lot
- auditors which flag nonsense and don't understand anything about security at all
some of the "security frameworks" which are applied by default makes a lot assumptions about how software is build/structured/works _based on what was common in the 90th_, and they don't even list their own assumptions... Luckily they are a base line you can perfectly fulfill but still a pain.
Like e.g. a session key having 128bit entropy is a reasonable minimum, but then imagine the framework assumes the session key & session id are the same because some 90th software did so and now requires you session ids to have 128bit entropy, but e.g. UUIDv4 has only 122bit entropy and a UUID being used is deeply integrated into middle-ware you use and can't be changed... (And having a session id=session key setup is anyway a bad idea as it means you mustn't log the session id anymore, but you also might have requirements which do require logging session ids in audit logs and similar).
This isn't even the most nonsensical thing I had ran into, just one I remember well. There where rules based on assumptions of you uploading files into a file system _using the upload file name_ while interleaving security sensitive web-server config files with uploaded directories ... like yes I know some software did so in the past but the rule should be "your software musn't do such a negligent thing" and not "you software must do this 5 extra steps in case it maybe does that insane negligent thing"
I saw my bank embedding a keylogger and it was even scrapping the password entered to login and basically slurping everything done on the page to an external domain. I checked with the bank and they said these were their analytics and nothing to worry...
I noticed this, because entering password was very laggy and saw in developer console it was sending a request with every key stroke.
The issue is weird. Banking is both conservative and on the lookout for new way to make things complicated, but one dumb executive --usually-- can't derail the entire bank, because there are enough stops in place. This is one of the reasons US banking is such a ridiculous mix of various integrations of a line of executive decisions resulting indirectly from lunches with said executives.
> But banks specifically are among the most obnoxious shitters when it comes to "you aren't allowed to do things except the way we want it".
> Over and over again you have to contend with bullshit like 120MB APKs full of obfuscated code, root detection, custom firmware detection, "non-mainstream device" detection, VPN detection, and even more obscure spyware-flavored functionality.
Ok, the question is then: exactly why do they go through that much trouble? Because that's a lot of trouble.
Same reason why media companies spend millions on DRM that delays the pirates by 0 days. Checklist-driven "security", CYA and out of touch executives calling the shots.
Did the higher ups want more effort to be spent on "security"? Yes. Is there any way to actually add "more security" to the setup? No. Could not doing anything in face of direct orders from the above be bad for your career? Yes. So random bullshit go.
It's not like the bank client developers are even implementing any of it themselves. They buy someone else's middleware and hopefully don't misconfigure it when they cram it into their builds.
> By now, if a major regulator like EU steps in, cracks the whip, and forces banks to provide access through a common API standard to any third party banking app? I'd welcome the change.
You mean like HTTPS? It's a shame that mobile banking website have fallen out of favor.
Then eMudhra happens and all that security theatre goes down the drain as you (as a device owner) are not allowed to even disable a pre-installed "trusted" CA. And then you can also run a old, vulnerable device with a "signed" OS and SafetyNet will happily allow you to run such apps.
ASN has been dysfunctional for years. They needed a bailout and ever since have only deteriorated in their operations. To be fair, their risk management has surely improved and their new CEO is great. But their actual operations are superbad. They only do the easy loans and mortgages because anything else they can't do. Still I think as a bank they are doing well, everyone is opening accounts there. Marketing matters more than service I suppose.
It's a bit outdated. The big green one isn't in the government majority ownership for a year and some now, so we installed back those glass shelves and cocaine dispensers in all restrooms by now.
Yes, the state is divesting from ABN AMRO (and apparently making a profit on it) but ASN is still 100% owned. I think Rabobank was the only one of the big banks that did not need state sponsorship. Probably due to the fact they are a cooperation and don't have shareholders to please.
My bank app works on GrapheneOS but checks play integrity and disables biometrics and lowers limits.
Thankfully I'm not forced to use it since I can log into the bank and authorize transactions with the government digital signature app, which uses hardware attestation and considers GOS fully secure.
Funnily enough, the bank's app crashes on launch with memory tagging enabled which means they have memory bugs.
Some more details: various people contacted ASN, but they are mostly pointing to Wero. The Play Integrity check is performed in the method nl.devolksbank.mobile.banking.security.data.wero.IntegrityRepository#requestIntegrityToken. From the name, this seems to be ASN's own code and not an SDK from Wero. Someone also found that the integrity token gets sent to ASN's own servers: https://m.devolksbank.nl/bspc-payment-consent-administration... (De Volksbank is the owner of ASN).
If this comes from Wero as they claim, I guess we Europeans in countries that are covered by Wero are in for a bad time. That said, some Dutch banks also made the migration from iDEAL to Wero and don't require Play Integrity.
That's their "Phase 1". They are currently building new infra. My ASN bank app just yesterday actually wanted me to go through some reauthentication flow for migrating to Wero so maybe they are actually moving to that now.
My (Dutch) bank Rabobank also blocks GrapheneOS [0], I contacted them about it, you get the usual thing, that "security is very important to them".
However, via Aurora store it works fine... I do feel a bit uncomfortable about it, but it's a one-to-one connection to the Play Store, so should be fine... What I don't understand is how that can work, the app itself does no checking after it is installed I guess?
My other bank, bunq, keeps whining about some service but functions normally nevertheless (I should give Play services access to my "Phone", I don't understand what that entails so I refuse it). N26 and Trade Republic just work.
I don't get wireless payments, so I'm really looking forward to Walt [1]. Would even start my sub now if that'd help him get it available in a year...
> The Rabobank app works fine on Android phones that haven't seen updates in years...
Exactly. If these companies were so serious about security, they should also block devices with, let's say, >1 year of security updates backlog. But that's a completely different number of users compared to negligible Graphene/Lineage/e userbases.
Of course they pass system integrity. The whole point of the thing is not "it should be secure", it's "the user has not messed with it so we control it".
If the device is "insecure", doesn't that mean you - as a user - can exploit one of those insecurities to "mess with" the device without system integrity being aware?
Or are you saying the device is insecure BUT has no local privilege escalations you can take advantage of as a user?
It could have RCE but not privilige escalation. But I don't buy it, because 5 years without kernel patches is at least 5 escalation exploits being written by the an llm in 5 minutes
They do not block unupdated phones because that will force users to buy exceptionally expensive devices to keep updated. Another thing is actually supportability. Just like any enterprise software, it targets a set of common devices so they can provide support and QA on it.
Now, that isn't to say there aren't security issues, nor that QA is perfect on devices they do support (like with any enterprise software projects), but it is a valid reason from a business perspective to not support everything.
Why do you think generally OpenBSD and such platforms aren't supported by commercial software, nor most open-source software? It adds a lot of burden for testing and QA on developers who will need to become intricately familiar with yet another platform.
People stare blindly at some customer support answers and hinge everything on those words, but if you think carefully about how software, compatibility and support work, this all makes perfect sense.
> They do not block unupdated phones because that will force users to buy exceptionally expensive devices to keep updated.
Hardly true, if they permitted Lineage and so on.
> Just like any enterprise software, it targets a set of common devices so they can provide support and QA on it.
Not really, there are a myriad of devices and they're not testing on all of them. A "pound sand if you're on an unsupported device and it isn't working" policy would be perfectly acceptable, as long as the issue isn't directly caused by the developer purposefully breaking the application for a subset of users that fail Play Protect check or whatever.
This bank claims "security is very important to them". In another, the poster reports getting training spam every week.
Installing Lineage isn't that hard. If they're going to badly inconvenience some customers / force hardware purchases, why not start with the ones who are most likely to get their accounts drained?
I'm sure they're completely unbiased source. But seriously, the real question is whether lineage is more or less secure than the stock ROMs that are currently allowed.
I have read the first comment in your link and just replied to it. Pretty sure it's incorrect as I've seen a LineageOS device in September with a September security update level, and you can see in Gerrit[0] that the version string bumps are merged every month, with the commit messages including which CVEs were fixed. New images are built weekly[1].
What I think happened is that GrapheneOS assumed the blog post meant that those updates happened at the time of the post, while the post is actually announcing things that were done in the last few months.
That's just a string, it doesn't mean that you actually have all the latest patches:
> Most non-Google-certified operating systems are setting an inaccurate Android security patch level by ignoring the non-AOSP portion of the patches. GrapheneOS doesn't do that but most of the other AOSP-based projects not being certified by Google are doing it. OEMs were caught doing it too but it's not clear if it was intentional in most cases as it is with the alternate operating systems.
If any of what you were saying were true, then this wouldn't be just a discussion about banking software all the time, and we would see it happen with all kinds of other software, scaling with the complexity of the application or the level of provided customer support or the intended sophistication of the user or how "enterprise" the target market sounds... but none of this is the case, and if you tried to cluster products that do this along some axes the ones that stick out like a sore thumb are all of the form "controls something sensitive": money (banking, payments, investing, etc.), health data, copyrighted media (streaming), and multiplayer gaming (due to cheating issues). All of these people are very open about why they think they do it, and while we know they are incompetent, they are not doing it to be malicious and they have no incentive to lie to you about this: if a bank were truly not supporting your device because it was rare, they'd just say it, and we have ample evidence of this from banks choosing to not support "niche" browsers (including an era of "anything other than IE6" omg ;P). So: "cool story bro", but it is clearly wrong, lol.
It's not about your security nor your account. They are protecting their app, their apis, their servers. Everything that makes the life more complicated for hackers will be deployed, even if that includes power-users hacking their own stuff.
Blocking people from rooting their own devices isn't meaningfully contributing to security, even if they think it is. Not relying on security through obscurity is one of the first things you learn when studying the subject.
Not relying on security through obscurity doesn't mean obscuring things is bad for security, it just means this is not sufficient. Relying only on this or getting a false sense of security due to this would be bad.
Walt looks great. Though I'm not sure I'd trust my financials to a service that posts "Launch dat shit" as a milestone in their roadmap on their homepage.
I actually love that about it. Look at those photo's, what a guy. Contrast this to some "pro" looking vibe coded website, I'll take that guy launching dat shit over that any day.
Why do we trust soulless orgs? Trust this dude who puts his own face on his product!
Defend my criticism of ignorance of circumstances by pointing out some similar vague notion of how I spent 15 years working in banks even though they are not this bank and this situation? No thanks.
Do you have anything to back this up? What I am asking for is specifically does the usage of an OS other than the preinstalled one have a causal, direkt link with the user's bank account being attacked and money being stolen from it?
You are making an authority argument. I and most others are not buying the validity of that authority having been subjected to insane (in)security (non)standards by banks elsewhere and one other sibling commentor even mentioning their work experience for banks as evidence.
In my career travels I am yet to find any professional group crow as confidently from on top of a hollow position as software developers. I think it has to do with daily operating from inside a deterministic environment, it gets projected out into human situations.
I take you resorting to name calling as not having any actual argument. It is always the same with this. When you ask for how this supposedly helps and what specific threats it protects against you just get vague references, gesturing in the direction of supposed authorities and the more you ask for an actual threat model the less precise and the more avoidant it gets.
We don't need a signing authority. Those "attestations" are are anti-user security theater. We need to stop requiring apps for everything. The internet was designed to be used in a browser that can run anywhere. 2FA can be done with simple texts or phone calls.
Incidentally I was happy to see that while they're phasing out their previous cryptographic identification device (that you put your bank card in) they will still support some kind of cryptographic usb dongle (in addition to smartphones).
Your account appears to be shadowbanned (your current comment is visible because people vouched for it). I'm letting you know since looking at your recent comments I can't see any obvious reason. You might want to use the contact link to talk to hn about it.
When I wanted to open a second account a few months back, ABN is the only bank I have not tried because, well, I have my first account with them... I could not find similar option with any other, though.
Not quite true. All banks really want you to use their app, and the neobanks actually demand it (and get away with it because they are not as important as the so-called system banks).
But look at the pages more carefully, and you'll note that there is a way to open an account using just a web browser too (e.g., look at abnamro.nl). The links are deemphasised by using dark UI patterns of course.
ING is being really dirty about this. It should be possible to open an account, and get the OTP hardware device that reads the chip on the debit card, but they don't document how you can open an account without the app. It's probably possible, as existing customers can bank without the app, but you will probably have to call them.
Banks would love to get rid of all those nasty people without approved smartphones, but that would cause political pushback.
Thats simply not true. If I want to open an account I can go to a Rabobank office and open an account. There are still plenty of Rabobank offices around. I can also access all features (even pay with Wero / iDeal) via my Rabobank scanner on my desktop via their website.
I really hope this doesn't mean other Dutch banks will follow suit. It's already quite impossible to actually contact someone at the bank who can understand the issue if it's on the technical side. I have no idea how I would even start to broach this topic with ABN Amro.
I thought that one of the goals of Wero was to become less dependent on US technology (Paypal). By requiring you to use either Android or iOS it seems to me as if that is more of a marketing ploy than anything else. As multiple other banks that support Wero however run on non-Google Android I think it is more likely that whoever wrote that message just doesn't know what they are talking about.
There will be no independence of US tech as long as everyone in europe has google or apple in their pocket and most administrations have windows on their PC. But, at least in germany, ruling parties are very slow to notice this.
They destroyed themselves by missing the window for starting an entirely new smartphone ecosystem. They should've either released Lumia years earlier before the iPhone/Android duopoly got established, or made their OS capable of running Android apps (e.g. by being Android).
My mortgage was with a bank that had a website but no app and I was happy, and then they merged with another bank and only had an app and not website and I was not at all happy. I swiftly moved to a bank that incidentally had a lower interest and both a competent app and website, and I noted to the previous merged bank that the reason I was leaving is that they did not accommodate me. Whether that feedback was heard, I'm unsure.
Not an option if all banks follow suit. If this trend continues you would only switch to a bank who hasn't yet locked down their app yet.
Hopping banks is easy for just savings, but a lot of work and inconvenience for your standard payment accounts, and that's ignoring additional services like mortgages and insurance.
I love how people think "vote with your wallet" is an option on most "vote with your wallet" issues. If people could vote with their wallets they wouldn't have to, would they?
Vote with your vote for politicians for common sense regulations that favor the consumer at the expense of everything else.
Indeed. It also fights symptoms rather than the underlying issue - that Google Play Integrity is an anti-competitive method that Google uses to shut out competition. The fact that Google-certified phones that are months behind on critical security updates (or even have malware in there updates as a recent case) do get a pass, shows that it is not really about security, but about destroying competition in the smartphone ecosystem as early as possible.
The solution is not voting with your wallet, but either leveraging the DMA or drafting new laws that counter this.
Either Google should be forced to approve secure alternatives like GrapheneOS or companies should be required to also implement AOSP attestation. Or alternatively, remote attestation should be banned completely, but I can understand the argument that it serves some legitimate uses.
I filed a complaint at ACM (Dutch authority consumer market) about this a while ago since you need to be a google partner to be approved and that is anti competitive. They were very interested in this and even asked for a follow-up. I think they have an open issue about this. So it is a good idea to contact your national authority.
This is how it should work, but not how it does. Dutch banks don't pass down increases in interest rates simply because the risk of losing customers is so low [1]. Dutch consumers don't want, can't be bothered, or have such loyalty to their bank of choice, that even a criminally-low rate won't convince them to switch bank
Dutch consumers don't want, can't be bothered, or have such loyalty to their bank of choice, that even a criminally-low rate won't convince them to switch bank
It is also just very hard in practice. A lot of people have their mortgages, savings that are locked for years, etc. at a bank. Also, switching a bank also impacts other family members if you have shared accounts, etc.
In this particular case it's also not fully clear yet whether Wero is starting to enforce this. If that happens to be the case, it's only a matter of time before other banks also start requiring Play Integrity for Wero transactions.
Savings rates on all savings accounts are useless. Rabobank even has a managed passive investment account that functionally works like a savings account if you really don't want to use funds yourself [0], I think ING does too. If you do use funds or invest otherwise it doesn't matter which bank you use.
Reminds me of the tweet i saw:
"My bank, who passed all 14 interest rate increases on to my mortgage, and none of them on to my savings account interest, is currently sending me tips on how to spot financial scammers"
If Wero becomes the pan-european solution for online payments it is slated to become, then no European bank will be exempt from this. Given that as a European your government covers up to €100,000 placed at any European bank in case that bank goes tits-up, you are likely to end with a European bank in any case.
> If Wero becomes the pan-european solution for online payments
It most likely won't, because people want the security that cards offer when they order online. Wero could be good or even great for other things, but not for making online purchases from another country.
The Dutch do nothing but use Ideal, Wero's predecessor, for online purchases. People very much want to simply transfer money from their bank to a shop, just as they can with a debit card. Most Wero transfers will be to shops in your own country, but don't underestimate its potential. Valve offers Ideal on Steam, and has done so for years now, and they can probably give some very appealing insights into how that unlocked a massive amount of gamers in the Netherlands.
The title sets a lot of blame on the bank, but there might be other factors at play. It is possible that either national or european regulations or laws makes it mandatory for the banks to comply with a set of security features that makes it impossible for them to offer services to degoogled phones. There might not be any alternative because it would cost too much money to develop and more importantly to distribute it. It can also be the case that Google uses its influence over the android open source project to make sure it will never be the case.
I don't think there is an actual written regulation that talks about attestation or SafetyNet.
I can imagine in some meeting with the ministry or an industry association that somebody in charge said "implement all safety measures that Google and Apple provide, no excuses" and they just execute it.
I could also imagine there is a real need to do so. Maybe somebody found that criminals use rooted phones to robotically launder money or something like that. Or there was a criminal case where someone got a bank account with a fake ID and used it on a burner phone. Then the developers get a discrete notice from law enforcement or regulatory bodies and are told to close that gap. Who knows?
I have a Pixel 6 with eOS and am happy that my banking app works on here. If it were to suddenly stop working, I would be kind of screwed though.
Similar thing happened with my Health Insurance. Germany is pushing towards getting rid of health insurance cards in favor of a digital identity. To manage this, use the NFC functionality at the doctor, and log into the insurance app or website for fetching messages, documents or other information, you will in the future have to authenticate yourself using a new authenticator app. Now the problem is, that the app from my insurer does not work! Surely because of some "non-standard Android" b****. Contacting their support is obviously useless, as they have no tech knowledge and assume that I have even less, therefore just regurgitate the same "how to install the app" steps from the Q&A. All I have left is to switch to a different insurance, who's ID app works on my phone.
While this is all very annoying, I do see the point that especially banking and insurance has to be very secure. And they aim to achieve this by obfuscation. Against this one might argue that open code is more secure, as everyone can check it. But this goes both ways, for good and bad intentions. And are there not much more resources and energy behind the bad than the good intentions?
Just a heads-up from a fellow Pixel 6 owner: it has reached end-of-life last month, because the five years since the launch in October 2021 are up. Better start looking for a replacement soon.
They don't block Graphene directly, they block any phone that doesn't have attestation, which the Graphene phone cannot have. https://grapheneos.org/usage#banking-apps
Basically, GrapheneOS on a phone counts as a "tampered" device.
You're right that I worded my comment wrongly. More precisely, GrapheneOS doesn't and cannot have the most convenient, most widespread, Google-backed tamper protection, which developers use because it's convenient, and often the easiest way to gain some authority, compliance, or just a badge of security.
So we had something good in the Netherlands with iDeal, then they had to make it EU global and they messed it up.
For starters there is going to be percentage commission on each payment instead of just a flat fee low price like iDeal has. For some reason they felt compelled to introduce buyer protection like a credit card has, instead of just making it a digital debit payment system. And now we are also forced in to the Google ecosystem.
Great. Just great.
Why do they even feel they need the Google Play integrity API anyway? If you are really so concerned about the kind of attacks that supposedly fixes, you better ban Windows, macOS and Linux desktops and notebooks from banking online. Because their security model doesn't even come close to what Android or iOS has.
The reasoning goes like that. App is more secure than web because 1. you can share a password but can't share the shared secret generated when the app is bound to account (lol, yes, they believe so) and 2. It has certificate pinning so you can be mitmed when the system trust store is manipulated
The app however is only secure as long as your system isn't rooted. To make sure it isn't rooted you need to ask somebody who signed the system image if the integrity still holds.
I heard interesting ideas about phones, such as all phones having secure enclave and hsm which the app is totally using, so you can't just lift both the encrypted secret and it's kek from the same filesystem
iDEAL | Wero was just a rebrand of iDEAL to make people get used to the new name Wero. The actual Wero roll-out has only just started. ASN and Bunq seem to be the first Dutch banks to actually roll out Wero (and not just renaming iDEAL to iDEAL | Wero).
ABN Amro also seems to be rolling out changes. I can't tell if it is just front end, but they did break some stuff. Including, annoyingly, making online payments without a phone.
The situation changes every couple of months, can't figure out if they unbroke it already.
Exactly. We are currently in a transition phase (of about a year iirc) where, for example, the fee will stay fixed. After that it will be a percentage of the total amount. Which is why Mollie announced[1] they would be launching a Wero alternative.
In the end this whole "buyer protection with percentage fee" is about the banks thinking: "We don't want to be a dumb digital sock for people's money. We have to provide value to them". But I want my bank to be a dumb digital sock to put my money in, nothing more. I'm really getting fat-up with all these MBA-types's thinking their company "needs to have a relation with me and add value". I mean I get emails from my utilities trying to get to know me. Seriously? I don't give a wooden nickle about my drinking water supplier. I just want to pay them and use their services and other than that I want to think about them as little as possible.
From the write-up, it looks like mollie will be using PSD2 Payment Initiation Service (PIS). Which is exactly what PSD2 PIS was meant for. Kudos to them.
Wero is an initiative introduced by the banks, not by the EU government. They specifically lobbied to make the "digital euro" initiative much worse so that it doesn't compete with Wero. So it makes sense that Wero has the interests of the banks in mind.
> To maintain that level of quality, we also need to be clear about our system requirements and avoid dedicating resources to troubleshooting issues on unsupported platforms and configurations.
This is such a corporate non-answer. If that was the problem, they could just detect the custom ROM and when someone calls support, the support agent could just say sorry not supported and hang up. I doubt that is the real issue.
One troubling possibility is that some security might be implemented client-side. Banks are ahead in security in some areas but far behind in others. Like in some cases you can just take money out of someones account if you know their account number, they rely on manual fraud detection, heuristics, and chargebacks. Instead of standard 2FA, my countries banks use a baroque parallel system. My password was for many years a word like "toast": It had a maximum length, had to be pronounceable over the telephone, was case insensitive etc.. Third party payment providers don't use something like OAuth but directly ask for my bank's password, and they used to just scrape the bank site, and so on.
But I think the real reason is regulatory, political, or due to pressure from the platforms. There is no pressing business or technical reason to go out of their way to block custom ROMs.
It used to be common in Germany to order things (e.g. per mail order catalog) by giving your name, address and account number. I think it is still used when signing up for services. And "SEPA direct debit mandates" are still popular.
Probably in-person at a branch. However they are allowed to use technology for certain tasks; their elders just have to discuss (and vote?) on it first.
Also the Amish are American and the American banking system is a very different (uglier) beast when we are talking about digitization when compared to the Dutch.
In Holland, GrapheneOS users are being targeted by police after "busting" a re-seller. The owners of the phones got raided without them being involved in any investigation. Just having the phone was enough to get a knock.
Supposedly the Dutch police had "cracked" their phones.
> Police were looking for […] Google Pixel phones. These have become popular among criminals in recent years […]. Among others, the murderers of Dutch crime reporter Peter R. de Vries had Google Pixel devices with them during the attack.
This is so braindead, it’s the same as “a black person committed a crime, lets search all black people!”
If someone with an iPhone commits a crime, will they do the same?
Peter R De Vries was a prolific crime reporter / journalist who did exceptional work in the Netherlands for many years until he was murdered in cold blood.
What it boils down to is that governments tend to prefer that the tools people have available to them are limited in capability.
iPhones and Apple systems in general are the most locked-down phones on the mainstream market, so very government-friendly in that sense.
It's why I'm always slightly disappointed to see developers using Apple systems. They're a far cry from the systems that Steve Wozniak originally built.
You can't decide to stop being black, but you can choose to not buy an iPhone. That's why race is a protected category and your smartphone is not.
And it is not "braindead". EncroChat was a "privacy service", selling phones featuring E2E encryption, disabled cameras and microphones, etc... Even though it wasn't marketed as such, it was mostly a service for criminals. And they effectively searched everyone using these devices (they hacked the firmware), and maybe a few people who weren't criminals got searched, as it happens in many investigations, most people turned out to be. The result was many arrests of people you really want to get arrested, with weapons, murder, torture, etc... being involved.
That's also the reason why mainstream apps like Signal are important for privacy, if only criminals use an app, having that app is a legitimate reason for being suspected. If most people using the app don't really need privacy and it is mostly used to talk about what to eat for dinner, that protects those who really need that privacy. And yes, it includes criminals, unfortunately, so it is actually a good thing for society when criminals use their own communication channels instead of using mainstream ones, good thing most of them are not so smart.
> You can't decide to stop being black, but you can choose to not buy an iPhone. That's why race is a protected category and your smartphone is not.
There are protected categories which person can choose to belong to. In USA these include for example religion. In EU political beliefs as well. So would it be okay to start suspecting anyone who is Christian if some Christian committed crime? Or anyone who supports AfD if AfD supporter committed crime? You can always choose to stop being Christian or AfD supporter.
This is the issue with being lenient on crime but also being liberal. You have to search for the "right" patterns to find your criminal. It happens that folks who care about privacy, and criminals, two distinct groups search and use the same set of technologies: wether it's grapheneOS, or others. I am also tired of people still looking suspicious at me for not having instagram, snap or tiktok or use whatsapp, it's like I dropped out of society, and that I use linux and use open source email clients/server, I use ublock origin advanced with blocking of scripts and 3rd party domains. Why privacy is an uphill daily battle.
> I am also tired of people still looking suspicious at me for not having instagram, snap or tiktok or use whatsapp, it's like I dropped out of society,
social media was designed to appear like it is society, endorsed by the same people who _made_ your society
i think its all just an illusion to make you work harder :(
When I was dating around there was more than one instance of the other person finding it weird/creepy/suspicious that I had no Twitter/Instagram/whatever. As if a 2025 Ted Bundy would make a social media account and then post about how much he likes killing people. Surely nobody lies on the internet!
According to our information, the reseller did not distribute official GrapheneOS. Using AI tools, he had built his own fork and added mobile device management (MDM) for remote administration. The result was a separate operating system that lacked, among other things, the security updates of the original project.
His signing keys for that system were probably compromised. Anyone holding those keys can build an update that the phones accept as genuine. Such an update was apparently installed on seized phones via ADB (Android Debug Bridge), an interface that requires a USB cable connection, and probably removed the screen lock. The phones could then be examined forensically. On our information, the authorities again needed the phone in their hands. On official GrapheneOS, the same approach would require the project's own signing keys.
I don't think the attack can work as described here. One of the features that GrapheneOS lists is:
> Insider attack resistance for updates to the secure element (Owner user authentication required before updates are accepted)
From my understanding, this means that even if you do have the signing keys, you cannot install an update that would remove the need for knowing the screen lock to unlock the filesystem's encryption - as installing such an update requires entering the screen lock first.
However if you have signing keys and access to the update delivery infra you could just publish the update and wait for it to get auto updated before starting to seize the phones.
This will keep happening so long as GrapheneOS is a "niche" operating system. We need to build up economic leverage by increasing GrapheneOS usage numbers until they can no longer afford to block it.
They are releasing a phone with official GrapheneOS support, but the operating system has to be reflashed by the user, and this phone will cost around $1,700.
Yes, but that's still a massive improvement. The phone will be much better than Pixels, and unlike Google, Motorola is actually capable of selling the phones worldwide.
The biggest problem is the price. I don't personally know anybody who would buy a phone that expensive. I was super interested in upgrading to it from my Pixel 7 Pro back when it was rumors. But I guess I'm gonna have to wait for a while for the price to go down.
It will be compatible but it won't come stock as they would breach their Google license (which is why you never see or never saw a pre-rooted phone sold by any official brand)
An OS available either for one Google product line or for a phone costing over 1000€ from Motorola, will never reach usage numbers high enough to change corporate policy on business grounds. (It may happen some executive within the company is just sympathetic to libre software even where there are no business pressure, but that's a long shot.)
Anyone who has been around in the free-phone community in the last decade-plus would recognize such idealism as mistaken and never once borne out in practice.
ASN was pretty bad - they recently wanted me to renew KYC/ID info. They wanted to install a Chrome Plugin that then would read the government KYC data. I nope'd out of that very fast. The alternative indeed was an app.
Nah. Unified Attestation is an initiative by some some companies that really have terrible security (years old kernels, drivers, firmware, often way behind on Android updates). They are also known for campaigns against GrapheneOS, including astroturfing. They also do a fair amount of eurowashing (in particular Volla, who sell UAE/Chinese phones as a European phone with a markup of hundreds of Euros).
If Unified Attestation would become a standard, they would use it to entrench themselves over GrapheneOS et al.
AOSP has an API for remote attestation attestation. Banks should just come up with a list of signing keys to be trusted. Heck, they can start here:
I'm not in the android rooting / modding scene anymore, but isn't there just a way to install a (Magisk?) module or something to spoof the Safetynet check anymore? I'm not saying that is a great idea, just in my memory theres workaround for this kinda thing.
There are two different Safetynet check levels. One (BasicIntegrity) is easily spoofable, bug GrapheneOS already passes that. The other requires Google certification.
So much for european countries wanting to become independent
of the USA.
There is no cohesive strategy. It will literally require a new
generation of younger people to replace the old lobbyists here -
and some of these younger people will become corrupt lobbyists
as well.
Open standards should become a human right. I am not kidding. I
fail to see why services in a given country, get tied down to
foreign companies and foreign countries.
No. It may have been part of the founding of the bank back in the day, but I worked an intensive five years at Triodos and this is the first time I've even heard that word. No one I worked with or saw in the organization was related to that movement. It was clear to everyone there that as a bank we focus on providing a service that is socially positive for the community, and the people there did take that very seriously, but from what I've seen Dutch society has that to some extent embedded in its fabric.
I believe you that regular employees are not a part of this, and if it were just something the CEO believed I wouldn't care. But they use customer funds to fund ahtropospohical institutions. See, for example,
Those aren't some old examples that I had to dig deep into the bank's archives to find, theyre just two examples of grants that are highlighted on their website right now. You and your colleagues probably weren't related to anthroposophy, but the management and the funding decisions definitely are.
From what I saw, if an organization can demonstrate a positive social impact and a business plan for paying them back, they have a good chance of getting funding. Judging from the number of customers they lend to, I have real doubts that this represents a large percentage of their customer base, or is on anyone's radar there.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] thread> This app has started using Play Integrity to block new signups, existing accounts continue to work fine for now.
https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...
It also make me feel safer not to have always on me the key to all my accounts.
Given Bunq's abysmal security track record it probably means they just forgot to enforce some policy that Wero requires on mobile devices - no matter how annoying these "no grapheneOS" policies are in general, of course.
Peak clown computing.
Leaving your phone unlocked basically meant someone could drain your account.
I reported it, zero response. Bunq, not even once.
Over and over again you have to contend with bullshit like 120MB APKs full of obfuscated code, root detection, custom firmware detection, "non-mainstream device" detection, VPN detection, and even more obscure spyware-flavored functionality.
By now, if a major regulator like EU steps in, cracks the whip, and forces banks to provide access through a common API standard to any third party banking app? I'd welcome the change.
Not sure what you mean. This should be the default for most things. Giving corps levers to abuse the users/consumers is going to result in exactly that.
As Dunning said and Marx quoted:
> "With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent. will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent. certain will produce eagerness; 50 per cent., positive audacity; 100 per cent. will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent., and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged."
AFAICT, psd2 should be sufficient to do the most elemental of banking features. See transactions and initiate them.
But that is quite limited.
To provide me with API access to my own accounts, Era goes through another third party provider which again connects to my bank. I guess they could eventually get direct connections themselves.
So instead of me get convenient read-only access to my bank, I've ended up giving two separate third party providers credentials I'd prefer they didn't have.
All I'd need was an automated way to get a CSV or JSON dump of my transactions and I'd have been happy, but none of my banks support that without manually logging in. It's infuriating.
https://doc.bunq.com/
it would be if wasn't for the obvious reasons of those being banks
I also consider restrictions against open source to be malicious acts - hence also malware, such as by banks and other companies. Or, worse, government agencies. In a local medical university in central Europe, for instance, we are required to either have a Google account or a Microsoft account - usually the latter, to access emails.
All paid by the taxpayers ...
Do you really think banks care about you installing custom themes or whatever? They only care because the cracked Spotify app also has malware bundled on the side which uses the new root access to break the app sandboxes.
The Fire Phone was a midrange Android phone from 2014 preloaded with Amazon's app store and services instead of Google's. It failed on its own merits, but I think Google got scared someone else would do a better job. The barrier to entry is a lot higher if most people can't use their banking app on it.
I keep seeing people say this, and it keeps being true that you can just go to your bank's website and do whatever it is you want to do.
Most European banks either don't have a web banking at all, or require a mobile app to log into it. There are exceptions but they are rare and becoming even rarer.
There are app only banks, you make your choice and you pay your price.
> will this mean we have to support one more standard, one more release channel, one more modified OS?
Android apps don't have to take any active steps to support third-party distributions. All they have to do is refrain from taking active stops to block them, but I suspect you knew that.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/30/business/technology-a-saf...
Since this post is about a Dutch bank, I think it's important to add some nuance to this. In the Netherlands, banks have pretty much been made responsible for any money a client loses that a bank could have theoretically prevented. This includes people wiring their life savings to someone who pretended to be a bank employee or police officer. This has become a massive cost to banks over here and they're trying to do anything to prevent this.
Right now, I need to wait 4 hours before I can increase the maximum amount I can transfer through internet banking. Want to buy something expensive and you forgot to do this? Too bad, try again in 4 hours.
> forces banks to provide access through a common API standard
Doesn't PSD2 already provide this?
It was nice to be able to spend $30k+ on short notice. With modern security features, there is no need to enforce an arbitrary time limit if the payer accepts the risks.
Eg the above example; how is it possible to send money without knowing who the other side is? I can trivially look up a domain name and see registration info, I can look up the IP to see who it’s registered to, I can check certs to see if they’re valid and legit.
It’s bizarre how normal we think it is to send large sums to random strings of digits that we think are Amazon or the IRS with basically 0 way to validate them.
I bought a house in cash and putting the money in escrow was unbelievably stressful. They send me numbers, on a printout that’s a scan of a scan of a scan with text that says “call to make sure this is still the right account number”, and a bajillion warnings to make sure the number is right or vague and terrible things might happen.
Insanity that I can get insanely complicated gadgets shipped to my house in 4 hours but we don’t have a better way to move 6 figure sums than “double check your numbers”.
This reads like you’ve never made a large purchase outside of the internet. I don’t know why you’d advocate for this except to be contrarian.
"Open banking" is kind of a thing with PSD2/PSD3, but in name only. In reality, it's impossible to build anything useful. Interacting with any of the "open" APIs requires approval from a national bank (or similar institution), which means there are many hoops to jump through.
There is only one bank I know of that offers an API for end users ("bunq" IIRC). Every other god damned bank insists on being user hostile.
You mean the step from sandbox to production application, or you're not even getting access to the sandbox itself? I managed to get sandbox access with ease via two separate banks (both Spanish though), with no problems, think it took them one (working) day or something to review my "application". I never tried to get anything into the production environments though, but makes sense they'd be a bit tighter on that tbh.
Access to that kind of data requires regulation, a lot of it and that's why Third Party Providers exist. There are a lot of them in Europe and they're not expensive.
I actually didn't expect to find anything about bunq around here but I have to say they're the worst bank I've worked with. When we started working with them, their API were broken and the devs had no idea why. It seems to have improved recently but it's definitely not a bank to praise for their API.
I know, that's my point. It's a stupid decision.
> Access to that kind of data requires regulation
It's my data. I want to access it how I see fit.
> There are a lot of them in Europe and they're not expensive.
I already have a bank and I already pay them. I don't want to pay anyone else to be able to use my bank account in a way that suits me. Sadly, there aren't many good options.
Someone mentioned Wise, and they do seem pretty interesting. But it makes no sense why common high strees banks refuse to cater to power users, or even to users who aren't using mainstream devices.
"Power users" don't make them more money. In fact, from their POV, you're a legal, reputational, and security liability.
They often act as marketing and can find and report security vulnerabilities rather than the criminal element doing so first.
It ain't your data, it's the bank's data about you. Banks are shitty about access, APIs because they are perpetually in CYA mode from KYC/AML rules from the US (also on most foreign banks) and GDPR and cousins in Europe.
I was actually surprised how many bank apps will work under GrapheneOS even if only partially.
Seriously, count your blessings man. In America we only get Plaid, which only works right or reliably for big banks (which are also the worst ones), and it isn’t an API for humans, just a paid SaaS product that a company who wants to offer integration with banks has to pay (i assume a lot) for.
Neither are technically a bank, but provide banking services. Mercury is more focused on big earners, and Crew is focused more on budgeting. Both have pretty extensive API surfaces.
(Disclaimer: Affiliate for Crew)
Vágj bele!!
Balances are held in Wise at your own risk.
Wise is really just a glorified interface on the account. And no, it's not a shared account. Those don't really exist in Japan.
Even if they did, I feel the result will be the opposite of what you expect. EU own reference implementation of eID relies upon Play Integrity [0].
[0]: https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-app-andro...
That would solve the issue rather quickly.
Normies don't understand the that any computer should be able to run software from any other computer. They dont get the idea of the general purpose computer. They've bought into the idea of computers-as-appliances sold by steve jobs and others.
The executives you're talking about don't see an issue with this. Their solution for this is the same as everything else: spend more money and buy another device. User freedom does not even enter the equation.
If they identify as a normie or an appliance peddler who is offended by the tone suggesting computers "should" be general purpose?
Or they are offended by the implication that said normies are perhaps unable to understand this lost potential, rather than making principled choices to embrace the appliance shlock?
So anyway, maybe the cheaper solution to your snow problem is to move here to Ireland :D
I fucking hate rublox for this. My children are not allowed to play this game for other reasons so the problem solved itself.
I like reusing old phones with custom ROMs.. it makes so much sense not to produce more waste.
I believe the fit is so poor that google should really object to it. I already refuse to make youtube videos because I need my gmail account.[1] If I need my google account for my ID and my payments I cant use gmail.[2] I also don't need Google ads badly enough.
It doesn't take a lot of stupid to lose the account but ANY account activity at all may trigger false positives.
In theory the US government can seize EU google accounts. Given time I'm sure we can find even crazier rulers than Ursula and Donald combined.
[1] - I got one flag for a 10 min video including 10 sec of 1991 footage from a local NZ news agency credited both in the video and linked in the description.
[2] - I've already lost my account once temporarily for jokingly hitting reply-all without looking how many cc's there were.
(otherwise it wasn't clear what 'Play' was referring to, could have been some EU thing)
It's just a way for app makers to point their finger at someone else.
No, Play Integrity labels those old systems as secure, _even though they are not secure_ due to lacking years of security patches.
Play Integrity does not prove that something is _secure_, only that the OS that is running _was approved by the phone maker_.
This is the crux of your entire argument, so you kind of need to actually substantiate it. Does Play Integrity catch an app from to Play Store using an exploit against a comically ancient vendor kernel to do anything it wants? How?
An immutable OS install and app sandboxing by default provide a lot of security. Those are present on third-party Android distributions that don't pass SafetyNet. Some users of those add root access so they can let a handful of apps out of the sandbox, but I'm willing to bet most of those are tech experts with better security habits than the average person.
Show me examples of actual data breaches and account takeovers SafetyNet would have stopped if you really want to defend this position.
I use legacy banks for some stuff (typically things that require underwriting), and neo-banks EMI's for things where legacy banks just don't move fast enough (cross boarder transactions, shared accounts, automations).
you assume this exists / can exist
(for a given set of reasonable requirements which aren't yours)
but various "practices" and "regulations" for software security push banks into the direction of such nonsense, so if a major reasons this is happening is the government asking them to fix it is very reasonable
similar in other context where that argument is often used you have problems like monopolies, collusive agreements or various source pushing companies into acting collectively user hostile weather it's laws or other reasons
the government fixing such things by changing laws/regulations is pretty much the only things which can work in many cases
this doesn't mean they have to tell companies exactly what to do, instead they (should) find out what pushes things in bad directions and then "counter balance it" in some form or way
To bring it around - the Non-Google android user base is small enough right now that there is no motivation for them to spend money to make their verification/validation stuff work on any non-mainstream platforms.
Unfortunately, banks can be held liable for customers getting scammed. Even if they win in the end, they have to make the customer whole first no matter what [1].
[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/verbraucher/eugh-konto-...
Because courts have made them pay the curtomer their losses when the customer (not the bank) was scammed/hacked/etc.
- max length of passwords (not talking about lengths that would pose a DoS threat, talking limits like 20 characters)
- incredibly constrained character set for passwords (“your password can’t contain a quotation mark, only alphanumeric and these specific 10 punctuation marks”)
- “security” questions (can we just ban these already? Knowing that my childhood dog’s name was Bingo should NOT give you the ability to change my brokerage password.)
EU has PSD2 which enforce good, strong rules on customer authentication. For example, banks must have two-factor authentication. And if both factors live on the same phone, the bank has to safeguard against that phone being compromised. Hence the root detection and app-integrity checks that he is complaining about.
But what's tragic is that instead of understanding the problem, which is partly driven by regulation and mostly not even a problem, he calls for more government regulation. What a mess.
It's a very difficult set of choices.
When you actually own your crypto currencies because you have the keys Binance cannot give away your money to North Koreans.
When you work in a regulated industry, you have to get pentests. The pentesters come with a list of "recommended best practices" to harden / secure your apps, which always include all of the user hostile bullshit you mentioned.
It's a finding if they're not implemented. Even if the dev team doesn't want to implement these things they get forced to by policy and the overall process :/
The only way this can NOT happen is if someone quite senior signs off on the risk, who would have to get in a big fight with the cyber/policy teams for basically no benefit to themselves. They would also have to be unusually technical and pro freedom to even understand the issues, which is not the typical personality profile of the kind of executive who ends up with overall risk authority for a bank's mobile app.
I basically said it was bullshit, pointed out that this was not industry best practice, and that we weren't storing any sensitive information.
The meeting ended quickly (and it became clear that the auditors were full of hot air.)
- auditors which commonly "pass" things which should be flagged, but happen to be a more expensive then normal industry standard in ways which should make them non-competive but somehow they get hired a lot
- auditors which flag nonsense and don't understand anything about security at all
some of the "security frameworks" which are applied by default makes a lot assumptions about how software is build/structured/works _based on what was common in the 90th_, and they don't even list their own assumptions... Luckily they are a base line you can perfectly fulfill but still a pain.
Like e.g. a session key having 128bit entropy is a reasonable minimum, but then imagine the framework assumes the session key & session id are the same because some 90th software did so and now requires you session ids to have 128bit entropy, but e.g. UUIDv4 has only 122bit entropy and a UUID being used is deeply integrated into middle-ware you use and can't be changed... (And having a session id=session key setup is anyway a bad idea as it means you mustn't log the session id anymore, but you also might have requirements which do require logging session ids in audit logs and similar).
This isn't even the most nonsensical thing I had ran into, just one I remember well. There where rules based on assumptions of you uploading files into a file system _using the upload file name_ while interleaving security sensitive web-server config files with uploaded directories ... like yes I know some software did so in the past but the rule should be "your software musn't do such a negligent thing" and not "you software must do this 5 extra steps in case it maybe does that insane negligent thing"
I noticed this, because entering password was very laggy and saw in developer console it was sending a request with every key stroke.
You need to have a bank account to live a life outside the woods.
I have multiple bank accounts, because I am a solopreneur, yet all of them are weird in their own ways
> Over and over again you have to contend with bullshit like 120MB APKs full of obfuscated code, root detection, custom firmware detection, "non-mainstream device" detection, VPN detection, and even more obscure spyware-flavored functionality.
Ok, the question is then: exactly why do they go through that much trouble? Because that's a lot of trouble.
Did the higher ups want more effort to be spent on "security"? Yes. Is there any way to actually add "more security" to the setup? No. Could not doing anything in face of direct orders from the above be bad for your career? Yes. So random bullshit go.
It's not like the bank client developers are even implementing any of it themselves. They buy someone else's middleware and hopefully don't misconfigure it when they cram it into their builds.
Wow, where'd you find a bank with a mobile app that lean? Please share for everybody's benefit! /s
Half a gigabyte of app bundles is unfortunately no longer an outlier...
You mean like HTTPS? It's a shame that mobile banking website have fallen out of favor.
Thankfully I'm not forced to use it since I can log into the bank and authorize transactions with the government digital signature app, which uses hardware attestation and considers GOS fully secure.
Funnily enough, the bank's app crashes on launch with memory tagging enabled which means they have memory bugs.
If this comes from Wero as they claim, I guess we Europeans in countries that are covered by Wero are in for a bad time. That said, some Dutch banks also made the migration from iDEAL to Wero and don't require Play Integrity.
However, via Aurora store it works fine... I do feel a bit uncomfortable about it, but it's a one-to-one connection to the Play Store, so should be fine... What I don't understand is how that can work, the app itself does no checking after it is installed I guess?
My other bank, bunq, keeps whining about some service but functions normally nevertheless (I should give Play services access to my "Phone", I don't understand what that entails so I refuse it). N26 and Trade Republic just work.
I don't get wireless payments, so I'm really looking forward to Walt [1]. Would even start my sub now if that'd help him get it available in a year...
[0] https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24630-rabobank-app-no-longe...
[1] https://walt.is/
Exactly. If these companies were so serious about security, they should also block devices with, let's say, >1 year of security updates backlog. But that's a completely different number of users compared to negligible Graphene/Lineage/e userbases.
Or are you saying the device is insecure BUT has no local privilege escalations you can take advantage of as a user?
Now, that isn't to say there aren't security issues, nor that QA is perfect on devices they do support (like with any enterprise software projects), but it is a valid reason from a business perspective to not support everything.
Why do you think generally OpenBSD and such platforms aren't supported by commercial software, nor most open-source software? It adds a lot of burden for testing and QA on developers who will need to become intricately familiar with yet another platform.
People stare blindly at some customer support answers and hinge everything on those words, but if you think carefully about how software, compatibility and support work, this all makes perfect sense.
Hardly true, if they permitted Lineage and so on.
> Just like any enterprise software, it targets a set of common devices so they can provide support and QA on it.
Not really, there are a myriad of devices and they're not testing on all of them. A "pound sand if you're on an unsupported device and it isn't working" policy would be perfectly acceptable, as long as the issue isn't directly caused by the developer purposefully breaking the application for a subset of users that fail Play Protect check or whatever.
I agree, but that is also totally unrealistic for normal people.
Btw, My son has a 200 eur Samsung Galaxy A26, very fine device for the price I have to say, and supported until feb 2031.
Installing Lineage isn't that hard. If they're going to badly inconvenience some customers / force hardware purchases, why not start with the ones who are most likely to get their accounts drained?
What I think happened is that GrapheneOS assumed the blog post meant that those updates happened at the time of the post, while the post is actually announcing things that were done in the last few months.
[0] https://review.lineageos.org/q/subject:%22release:+Bump+Secu...
[1] https://download.lineageos.org/devices/frankel/builds
> Most non-Google-certified operating systems are setting an inaccurate Android security patch level by ignoring the non-AOSP portion of the patches. GrapheneOS doesn't do that but most of the other AOSP-based projects not being certified by Google are doing it. OEMs were caught doing it too but it's not clear if it was intentional in most cases as it is with the alternate operating systems.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49768635
Why do we trust soulless orgs? Trust this dude who puts his own face on his product!
Even though the banks' policies are driven by incident responses and real data, whereas your position is presented on theory.
Do you have anything to back this up? What I am asking for is specifically does the usage of an OS other than the preinstalled one have a causal, direkt link with the user's bank account being attacked and money being stolen from it?
Direct specific evidence to back up the criticism that these guys are not looking at data and just making up dumb rules to reduce their customer base.
It is on you to back up your claim.
Does Wero work for you?
Wero I never used/tried...
But this authority could be a bunch of cool people like Letsencrypt, instead of only Google.
All other banks only allow you to open an account via their app.
https://www.abnamro.nl/en/personal/payments/open-an-account/...
Incidentally I was happy to see that while they're phasing out their previous cryptographic identification device (that you put your bank card in) they will still support some kind of cryptographic usb dongle (in addition to smartphones).
When I wanted to open a second account a few months back, ABN is the only bank I have not tried because, well, I have my first account with them... I could not find similar option with any other, though.
But look at the pages more carefully, and you'll note that there is a way to open an account using just a web browser too (e.g., look at abnamro.nl). The links are deemphasised by using dark UI patterns of course.
ING is being really dirty about this. It should be possible to open an account, and get the OTP hardware device that reads the chip on the debit card, but they don't document how you can open an account without the app. It's probably possible, as existing customers can bank without the app, but you will probably have to call them.
Banks would love to get rid of all those nasty people without approved smartphones, but that would cause political pushback.
TIL all Dutch banks (except ASN) closed all their branches and you can't register new account in the branch, what a progressive society it must be...
https://github.com/PrivSec-dev/banking-apps-compat-report/is...
I really hope this doesn't mean other Dutch banks will follow suit. It's already quite impossible to actually contact someone at the bank who can understand the issue if it's on the technical side. I have no idea how I would even start to broach this topic with ABN Amro.
source: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Sovereign-payment-service-Wero-...
No, it is not troubling, it is realistic for a service with high expectations and reliability expected, on tight schedules/resources
My mortgage was with a bank that had a website but no app and I was happy, and then they merged with another bank and only had an app and not website and I was not at all happy. I swiftly moved to a bank that incidentally had a lower interest and both a competent app and website, and I noted to the previous merged bank that the reason I was leaving is that they did not accommodate me. Whether that feedback was heard, I'm unsure.
Hopping banks is easy for just savings, but a lot of work and inconvenience for your standard payment accounts, and that's ignoring additional services like mortgages and insurance.
Vote with your vote for politicians for common sense regulations that favor the consumer at the expense of everything else.
The solution is not voting with your wallet, but either leveraging the DMA or drafting new laws that counter this.
Either Google should be forced to approve secure alternatives like GrapheneOS or companies should be required to also implement AOSP attestation. Or alternatively, remote attestation should be banned completely, but I can understand the argument that it serves some legitimate uses.
That's not good enough, you also need to convince regular people to do the same. Your vote alone will not achieve anything.
[1]: https://www.acm.nl/en/publications/acm-savings-rates-lag-beh...
It is also just very hard in practice. A lot of people have their mortgages, savings that are locked for years, etc. at a bank. Also, switching a bank also impacts other family members if you have shared accounts, etc.
In this particular case it's also not fully clear yet whether Wero is starting to enforce this. If that happens to be the case, it's only a matter of time before other banks also start requiring Play Integrity for Wero transactions.
0: https://www.rabobank.nl/particulieren/beleggen/rabo-beheerd-...
I've completed my transfer this year. I am waiting a few more months to close my Dutch bank account (with the parent company of ASN). Good riddance.
It most likely won't, because people want the security that cards offer when they order online. Wero could be good or even great for other things, but not for making online purchases from another country.
I can imagine in some meeting with the ministry or an industry association that somebody in charge said "implement all safety measures that Google and Apple provide, no excuses" and they just execute it.
I could also imagine there is a real need to do so. Maybe somebody found that criminals use rooted phones to robotically launder money or something like that. Or there was a criminal case where someone got a bank account with a fake ID and used it on a burner phone. Then the developers get a discrete notice from law enforcement or regulatory bodies and are told to close that gap. Who knows?
Similar thing happened with my Health Insurance. Germany is pushing towards getting rid of health insurance cards in favor of a digital identity. To manage this, use the NFC functionality at the doctor, and log into the insurance app or website for fetching messages, documents or other information, you will in the future have to authenticate yourself using a new authenticator app. Now the problem is, that the app from my insurer does not work! Surely because of some "non-standard Android" b****. Contacting their support is obviously useless, as they have no tech knowledge and assume that I have even less, therefore just regurgitate the same "how to install the app" steps from the Q&A. All I have left is to switch to a different insurance, who's ID app works on my phone.
While this is all very annoying, I do see the point that especially banking and insurance has to be very secure. And they aim to achieve this by obfuscation. Against this one might argue that open code is more secure, as everyone can check it. But this goes both ways, for good and bad intentions. And are there not much more resources and energy behind the bad than the good intentions?
Is it legit?
Basically, GrapheneOS on a phone counts as a "tampered" device.
For starters there is going to be percentage commission on each payment instead of just a flat fee low price like iDeal has. For some reason they felt compelled to introduce buyer protection like a credit card has, instead of just making it a digital debit payment system. And now we are also forced in to the Google ecosystem.
Great. Just great.
Why do they even feel they need the Google Play integrity API anyway? If you are really so concerned about the kind of attacks that supposedly fixes, you better ban Windows, macOS and Linux desktops and notebooks from banking online. Because their security model doesn't even come close to what Android or iOS has.
The app however is only secure as long as your system isn't rooted. To make sure it isn't rooted you need to ask somebody who signed the system image if the integrity still holds.
I heard interesting ideas about phones, such as all phones having secure enclave and hsm which the app is totally using, so you can't just lift both the encrypted secret and it's kek from the same filesystem
The situation changes every couple of months, can't figure out if they unbroke it already.
In the end this whole "buyer protection with percentage fee" is about the banks thinking: "We don't want to be a dumb digital sock for people's money. We have to provide value to them". But I want my bank to be a dumb digital sock to put my money in, nothing more. I'm really getting fat-up with all these MBA-types's thinking their company "needs to have a relation with me and add value". I mean I get emails from my utilities trying to get to know me. Seriously? I don't give a wooden nickle about my drinking water supplier. I just want to pay them and use their services and other than that I want to think about them as little as possible.
[1] https://www.accountant.nl/nieuws/2026/10/betaalbedrijf-molli...
Wero is a mess.
https://www-accountant-nl.translate.goog/nieuws/2026/10/beta...
This is such a corporate non-answer. If that was the problem, they could just detect the custom ROM and when someone calls support, the support agent could just say sorry not supported and hang up. I doubt that is the real issue.
One troubling possibility is that some security might be implemented client-side. Banks are ahead in security in some areas but far behind in others. Like in some cases you can just take money out of someones account if you know their account number, they rely on manual fraud detection, heuristics, and chargebacks. Instead of standard 2FA, my countries banks use a baroque parallel system. My password was for many years a word like "toast": It had a maximum length, had to be pronounceable over the telephone, was case insensitive etc.. Third party payment providers don't use something like OAuth but directly ask for my bank's password, and they used to just scrape the bank site, and so on.
But I think the real reason is regulatory, political, or due to pressure from the platforms. There is no pressing business or technical reason to go out of their way to block custom ROMs.
UK definitely and I thought EEC banks use a different system that stops that.
Also the Amish are American and the American banking system is a very different (uglier) beast when we are talking about digitization when compared to the Dutch.
Supposedly the Dutch police had "cracked" their phones.
In Dutch https://archive.is/3wawb
This is so braindead, it’s the same as “a black person committed a crime, lets search all black people!”
If someone with an iPhone commits a crime, will they do the same?
So Peter de Vries is effectively the dutch equivalent of John Smith.
iPhones and Apple systems in general are the most locked-down phones on the mainstream market, so very government-friendly in that sense.
It's why I'm always slightly disappointed to see developers using Apple systems. They're a far cry from the systems that Steve Wozniak originally built.
And it is not "braindead". EncroChat was a "privacy service", selling phones featuring E2E encryption, disabled cameras and microphones, etc... Even though it wasn't marketed as such, it was mostly a service for criminals. And they effectively searched everyone using these devices (they hacked the firmware), and maybe a few people who weren't criminals got searched, as it happens in many investigations, most people turned out to be. The result was many arrests of people you really want to get arrested, with weapons, murder, torture, etc... being involved.
That's also the reason why mainstream apps like Signal are important for privacy, if only criminals use an app, having that app is a legitimate reason for being suspected. If most people using the app don't really need privacy and it is mostly used to talk about what to eat for dinner, that protects those who really need that privacy. And yes, it includes criminals, unfortunately, so it is actually a good thing for society when criminals use their own communication channels instead of using mainstream ones, good thing most of them are not so smart.
There are protected categories which person can choose to belong to. In USA these include for example religion. In EU political beliefs as well. So would it be okay to start suspecting anyone who is Christian if some Christian committed crime? Or anyone who supports AfD if AfD supporter committed crime? You can always choose to stop being Christian or AfD supporter.
Anom is one where the creators were in jail, but only after they were caught directly participating in drug operations.
social media was designed to appear like it is society, endorsed by the same people who _made_ your society
i think its all just an illusion to make you work harder :(
According to our information, the reseller did not distribute official GrapheneOS. Using AI tools, he had built his own fork and added mobile device management (MDM) for remote administration. The result was a separate operating system that lacked, among other things, the security updates of the original project.
His signing keys for that system were probably compromised. Anyone holding those keys can build an update that the phones accept as genuine. Such an update was apparently installed on seized phones via ADB (Android Debug Bridge), an interface that requires a USB cable connection, and probably removed the screen lock. The phones could then be examined forensically. On our information, the authorities again needed the phone in their hands. On official GrapheneOS, the same approach would require the project's own signing keys.
https://www.joint-defense-team.com/post/grapheneos-cracked-p...
> Insider attack resistance for updates to the secure element (Owner user authentication required before updates are accepted)
From my understanding, this means that even if you do have the signing keys, you cannot install an update that would remove the need for knowing the screen lock to unlock the filesystem's encryption - as installing such an update requires entering the screen lock first.
Anyone who has been around in the free-phone community in the last decade-plus would recognize such idealism as mistaken and never once borne out in practice.
We should be encouraging banks to support the platform, not specific distros.
There is an alternative to Google's proprietary and unprivate integrity API that every bank now uses (and is at the root cause of this issue):
https://uattest.net
Spread the word.
If Unified Attestation would become a standard, they would use it to entrench themselves over GrapheneOS et al.
AOSP has an API for remote attestation attestation. Banks should just come up with a list of signing keys to be trusted. Heck, they can start here:
https://grapheneos.org/attestation.json
There is no cohesive strategy. It will literally require a new generation of younger people to replace the old lobbyists here - and some of these younger people will become corrupt lobbyists as well.
Open standards should become a human right. I am not kidding. I fail to see why services in a given country, get tied down to foreign companies and foreign countries.
https://steinermentary.com/steinerlens/triodos.html
An anthroposophical pseudomedicine center:
https://www.triodos.nl/projecten/gezondheidscentrum-de-lemni...
An anthroposophical school:
https://www.triodos.nl/projecten/steinerschool-michaeli
Those aren't some old examples that I had to dig deep into the bank's archives to find, theyre just two examples of grants that are highlighted on their website right now. You and your colleagues probably weren't related to anthroposophy, but the management and the funding decisions definitely are.