Hacker News Reader

Comment by hiciu | Hacker News Reader

> someone can set up a token-as-a-service to sell tokens on the black market

They can! Singing requires either PIN or finger on the fingerprint, and signed "proof" is valid for like 60 seconds. This whole end-to-end attestation with play integrity is supposed to make setting up token-as-a-service things impractical.

> What's going to stop the government from keeping all the salts they're issuing and then mandating that site operators add the salts to their existing logs?

> How does the math say no

BBS+ signatures. Hashes you receive from the government and hashes you send to the site operator are different and not correlated.

View on HN

> Singing requires either PIN or finger on the fingerprint, and signed "proof" is valid for like 60 seconds. This whole end-to-end attestation with play integrity is supposed to make setting up token-as-a-service things impractical.

So how would I use this on Linux then? Because I'd be rather unhappy if a bunch of websites became unusable on Linux due to government-mandated security restrictions.

My (Canadian) government's health portal already refuses to load if you use Linux (despite it being 100% web-based), meaning that I'm completely unable to book vaccinations or view procedure results without workarounds. Luckily it only checks the user agent, so it's pretty easy to override this right now, but that wouldn't be possible if cryptography/attestation were involved.

> how would I use this on Linux

Governments and businesses have already decided that it's fine to mandate that you own an unmodified smartphone made by one of the major manufacturers, so it's not much of a stretch to assume that they will also eventually require you to run an attested OS image made by one of the two major manufacturers. The fact that some run Linux internally isn't going to help your case: governments do a lot of things internally that you're not allowed to do. I used to watch cops in Amsterdam park on the sidewalk to go get a kebab, for example.

> This whole end-to-end attestation with play integrity is supposed to make setting up token-as-a-service things impractical.

Indeed according to some (i.e. the Commission) it's supposed to, but they should know better. And many member state wallet developers do know better.

Play Integrity can easily be bypassed unless you want to exclude a very large amount of users – especially disadvantaged people using older phones – because there are many vulnerable phones in use by those users, and you only need one to build such an age attribute faucet.

See also this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45363853

Reply on news.ycombinator.com