More Security for Mobil Transactions - Experience «Protected Confirmation» on a Trusted UI

Certain computations require an additional level of trust, which may not be provided by standard software execution environments. In those cases, the EUDI Wallet may rely on a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) and Secure Elements (SE) locally or a remote equivalent or similar technology depending on the device to execute those computations. Identifying means to enforce a common standard to access a TEE or SE in the EUDI Wallet will be defined as it will provide higher level of trust to the whole implementation.

This is what the European eIDAS (electronic IDentification, Authentication and trust Services) explicitly states in chapter 4.3.2 «Trusted Environments» of their European Digital Identity Architecture and Reference Framework and it’s where Android Protected Confirmation (APC) kicks in. APC allows «trusted confirmation» (transactions confirmation) with hardware backed keys on a so-called Trusted User Interface – a hardware-protected user interface operated in an asserted Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). «Protected Confirmation» asserts end users’ approval with a high degree of confidence even if the operating system or its kernel have been compromised.

Transaction Confirmation on Trusted UI

A demo app, which was developed by researchers from the Institute for Cybersecurity and Engineering ICE at the Bern University of Applied Sciences BFH, lets users experience «protected confirmation» on an Android device – currently only supported on Pixel 3+ devices.

Using the demo app, interested parties can easily gain insight into how the new security function behaves and give their opinion in a survey on where they see the greatest application potential. In a next step, the project team is piloting «Protected Confirmation» in the UBS Access app.  

This project is an innovation project supported by Innosuisse and UBS Next.