The EU’s age verification app can be hacked in 2 minutes. (Found by Paul Moore)
Demo :
https://youtu.be/1hfDOhrNx1I
In short :
- The pin you set to lock the app is encrypted, not hashed, which means with the private key of the app it could be reversed (there’s no need to get that as you’ll see in the next points
- Once you verify your age, the pictures and data identifying you is not deleted. Although on regular phones you and other apps can’t access it as they are protected at the Android level, this is still a breach of GDPR
- The app’s data is stored in a shared preferences file, which is pretty much just plain text. If you delete the key for your PIN, the app will let you create a new one, and still access the data of the old account.
- Nevertheless, the EU still brands it as a privacy friendly option on their site at https://t.ly/labwF
In short, don’t verify your age online! This is really bad for privacy!
@privacy
#privacy #europe #opensource #cybersecurity #ageverification
@vapeloki The issue is, once again, not that the app allows you to bypass age verification or anything with how countries implement it. It’s that the app makes it extremely easy to get the data and spoof someone else, while claiming it’s secure and privacy focused while it is not.
A prectical example would be :
- Someone steals my phone
- They can access the app as they can bypass the PIN
- They can appear and act as myself on any platform that will use the system to verify
No matter how countries implement it or how the app is still “in development”, I’m just saying that this current implementation is insecure and can be very easily hacked besides what is being said on the public spaces like the dedicated website and the twitter account of the president of the EU commission.
I will probably stop replying to this thread now as you keep telling me the same arguments and even when I demonstrate how I disagree with them, you keep repeating the same ones so I’ll just stop wasting my time
I don’t say the code isn’t sloppy and should never go live I. It’s state.
I say: show me the app on the app store that you can download and use.
We are talking about security issues in a reference implementation.
We are not talking about an app. All this does is to spread fear and if this whole thing is not accepted by the Public because of this , what then? We land up in a privatisation scenario once again and then fuck privacy.
This state of the Codebase is fixable, but stop talking about it like it would be a released app. It is not.