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The Vietnam government has banned rooted phones from using any banking app

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Re: The Vietnam government has banned rooted phones from using any banking app

#131

Post by alephnerd »

linkregister wrote: post #121

This is likely part of the Vietnamese and Thai governments' rollout of biometric linking for bank accounts, similar to KYC regulations in the United States. The deadline for Vietnamese biometric linking was December 19th, 2025 [1]. The Vietnamese government has reported a rise in account takeovers and other banking thefts [2]. SIM-swapping has been a tactic used. Adding difficulty for fraudsters to trick unsophistica…

Partially, but it's also connected with the VNeID project [0]. The goal is by 2030 [1], all Vietnamese nationals and foreign visitors will have a digital biometric ID attached to themselves, and all services linked to said ID.

[0] - https://vneid.gov.vn/

[1] - https://tuoitre.vn/thieu-tuong-nguyen-ngoc-cuong-nang-cap-vn...

Re: The Vietnam government has banned rooted phones from using any banking app

#132

Post by Zak »

ecshafer wrote: post #119

When I used to work on the Vanguard authentication team, we blocked Vietnam from access because of too much fraud (not my choice). But it was funny because we had Vietnam based clients, so there were a couple HNW clients in the logs that you could see who would log in from Vietnam/Russia/Wherever, get blocked, open their vpn, then log in from England. This was a while back, but even then there was a push for things l…

I'd be really interested to know whether a significant amount of fraud and fraud attempts involve devices with root or non-stock operating systems.

This has always struck me as a matter of checkbox compliance rather than a commonly-exploited attack vector, though I'll grant that's partially because few people actually use such devices.

Re: The Vietnam government has banned rooted phones from using any banking app

#133

Post by kube-system »

Arbortheus wrote: post #4

Do those same banks have websites that you can access from a computer with root access? Most likely, yes.

There has been a trend away from this over the past decade. Some banks require mobile apps for some or even all interactions.

The banks that allow you to do everything on their website trend towards legacy and US-centric.

Re: The Vietnam government has banned rooted phones from using any banking app

#134

Post by SkiFire13 »

Fiveplus wrote: post #82

So, if you cannot cryptographically prove to a remote server that your device is running essentially unmodified, vendor-signed software, you are locked out of the economy? The irrefutable part here is that the security model works. Locking down the bootloader and enforcing TEE signatures does stop malware. But it also kills user agency. We are moving to a model where the user is considered the adversary on their own…

> Locking down the bootloader and enforcing TEE signatures does stop malware.

I have no idea about the kind of malware you're talking about.

Re: The Vietnam government has banned rooted phones from using any banking app

#135

Post by seszett »

Helmut10001 wrote: post #106
Fiveplus wrote: post #82

So, if you cannot cryptographically prove to a remote server that your device is running essentially unmodified, vendor-signed software, you are locked out of the economy? The irrefutable part here is that the security model works. Locking down the bootloader and enforcing TEE signatures does stop malware. But it also kills user agency. We are moving to a model where the user is considered the adversary on their own…

As I mentioned in another post: By 2026, you'll need two phones. My current setup: 1) An unmodified iPhone SE (2022 model) with OS support until 2032. This runs all my authentication, banking, health, etc. It is in airplane mode 99% of the time unless I need it. 2) The second is a Pixel 9a with Graphene OS for daily use, routing and internet access. This is expensive, but I found it to be the only viable solution to…

That's what I do too (not iOS + GrapheneOS but the result is the same) as I was tired of fighting to make my bank apps and itsme (digital identity app in Belgium) work on my rooted phone.

Everytime I have to use a stock phone I'm appalled at the ads and I have absolutely no trust in any US or Chinese manufacturer. So I use them only for banking and digital id because that's presumably not what they actually care about.

It's not that expensive, I think many people have an old Android phone lying around, it doesn't have to be up to date.

Re: The Vietnam government has banned rooted phones from using any banking app

#136

Post by phantom784 »

finaard wrote: post #127
Fiveplus wrote: post #82

So, if you cannot cryptographically prove to a remote server that your device is running essentially unmodified, vendor-signed software, you are locked out of the economy? The irrefutable part here is that the security model works. Locking down the bootloader and enforcing TEE signatures does stop malware. But it also kills user agency. We are moving to a model where the user is considered the adversary on their own…

I guess you can still do banking on your PC? I stopped using banking apps on my phones a few years ago - they got more and more annoying, and I don't buy into the "the device is secure and should be used as a trust token". So I'm now back to banking only on my computer, with a hardware token for TAN generation.

That probably means giving up the ability to mobile deposit checks - every bank I've ever had only allows that through their app.

Re: The Vietnam government has banned rooted phones from using any banking app

#137

Post by cmxch »

Fiveplus wrote: post #82

So, if you cannot cryptographically prove to a remote server that your device is running essentially unmodified, vendor-signed software, you are locked out of the economy? The irrefutable part here is that the security model works. Locking down the bootloader and enforcing TEE signatures does stop malware. But it also kills user agency. We are moving to a model where the user is considered the adversary on their own…

Only if the vendor isn’t plying malware themselves.

The only solution is to force some semblance of user agency on those models, such that the vendor isn’t imposing from above.

Re: The Vietnam government has banned rooted phones from using any banking app

#138

Post by abdullahkhalids »

Aspos wrote: post #99
elric wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no laws banning this in any European countries that I'm aware of, except maybe Hungary? It's just banks being stupid, consumer-hostile, and anti-competitive.

Well, I've built a bunch of mobile banking apps and we did detect if the phone was rooted, was in dev mode, etc. and it is not because we were "stupid, consumer-hostile, and anti-competitive". If someone steals the secrets from a rooted phone and steals customer's money the bank is on the hook, so banks do everything they can to minimize this risk. There is no way to store customer's secrets in a PC browser securely,…

Why don't banks just make desktop computer applications?

Re: The Vietnam government has banned rooted phones from using any banking app

#139

Post by NoGravitas »

ThePowerOfFuet wrote: post #116
Helmut10001 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I mentioned in another post: By 2026, you'll need two phones. My current setup: 1) An unmodified iPhone SE (2022 model) with OS support until 2032. This runs all my authentication, banking, health, etc. It is in airplane mode 99% of the time unless I need it. 2) The second is a Pixel 9a with Graphene OS for daily use, routing and internet access. This is expensive, but I found it to be the only viable solution to…

GrapheneOS is not rooted. Most banking apps work fine on it. https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa... https://grapheneos.org/usage#banking-apps

It's true that GrapheneOS is not rooted, and, unlike other non-rooted custom ROMs, allows re-locking the bootloader. But, whether a banking app will work depends on what level of Google Play attestation they require. While most banking apps work fine on it, a significant minority do not.

Re: The Vietnam government has banned rooted phones from using any banking app

#140

Post by basilikum »

There are two plausible explanations for this:

1. Incompetence. The same reason why many banks al around the world do this without regulations. Some snake oil salesman sold them a security theater SDK or library that blocks user installed or modified OSes.

2. Government control and surveillance. Vietnam is authoritarian. It only makes sense for them to participate in the global war against general purpose computing to gain complete control over their citizens' devices allowing them to restrict software, displayed content and communication to require government approval and enable total surveillance of all activity without any way to bypass this. Instead of outlawing user controlled general purpose computing directly they do it through the backdoor of pretending that it is for people's own safety.

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