Scaling eIDAS 2.0 Wallets: The Secure Element Problem

So thank you very much for having me. So just get my props up. So what I'm, I'm going to show you a bit of code later on, so I just wanted to basically massage the brains a bit. So I want to ask you guys is how many sec, so how long will it take me to count up to a million if it takes one second to count? Anybody know from your heart? It takes you approximately 11 days?

Two, some, something about two weeks, right? So now some of you probably flew in today, and that means that you use a passport. So we have been talking about wallets the whole day, right? So what makes passport unique?

A pe it's, it, it contains a chip, right? It's a secure chip, and that's secure. Chip makes it unclonable, it has verifiable data on it. So I know the data provenance that it's from the government and it contains a photo, a high quality photo with also provenance assured so it can match it to myself. And I can show a passport, and you probably have done it a couple of times. You put it in the machine and then you can go through it.

Now, apple introduced a wallet, introduced a iPhone in 2007, and now 17 years later, we still don't have a passport on our phones, right? So why is that? Because our passports don't have a chip.

Our, our mobile phones don't have a chip on it like our passports. And if it would have a chip on it, you now have two options. You use it as a passport physically, but you can now also use this passport digitally. So that means that we can replicate situations where we are actually showing our passport, our public identity on a digital scale. I'm Boris Garnov, I'm the CEO of Ubi, q and as Ubi Q, we have created a solution to have a chip on your mobile phone. So we need a secure chip and we have it. But let's focus first on what does it actually mean to have a passport on your mobile phone?

So that means that, so we've been talking about wallets the whole day. So I won't go into what is a wallet? How does a wallet, how do you issue, how do you verify? What's a verify credential? But a critical component of the wallet is you need to store cryptographic material into the wallet in some form or way. And now the critical part that the EU has been defining for 30 years is a so control. How do you assure that the user has control of his home? Cryptographic dev cryptographic material.

Now, why do we need secure elements? So this is the code part, right? So I started my career where we were actually doing differential power analysis on smart cards so that we're measuring the power output of a chip. And then with the power consumption of the chip, whenever something is calculating, it's using energy. And based on that energy signature, you can actually calculate back the cryptographic keys if a chip is not secured against that. Another approach is to attack hardware, is what's called a brownout. Who knows what a brownout is? Very good. You're going to learn something.

A brown out is this, where there, there's a power outage, but it's not completely gone. It just dips a bit, right? So your your your your, your lights flashes. Now you can do that with a chip. We can have a microprocessor that's calculating and we, and if you control the voltage of the chip, you can just have it, have it run on the minimum voltage that it's running correctly. What I now can do is, is I can automate and play around with the power. So when it comes to some kind of, if statements, for instance, if the, is the, if is the pin correct, I can just dip it a bit.

So the, the the, the, the, the microprocessor will go a bit haywire. So that means that the, a result of that comparison will start to become random, right?

And then, or I could dip it completely so that it doesn't write, oh, it was wrong. So that I can play around with that. So now imagine it takes me a second and I need a million tries to hack a piece of hardware. How long do you think it'll take me to hack the the chip? It'll be two weeks. But suppose you don't have a secured cryptographic device that actually is resistant to these kind of attacks such as a normal microprocessor, then it's trivial. It takes you a couple of seconds.

So we need secure hardware to protect against physical advanced attacks either through power or through manipulation or power, because I'm not basically opening the chip, I'm not breaking it, I'm just influencing it in a sophisticated way. So we need them. And the good thing is is that the RAF actually understands that and defines that you need secure elements and it defines a couple of options for secure elements. The first option is a remote wallet, crypto aggression, secure crypto device. It also defines a local external.

What that basically means is you've got your ID card and you hold it to your phone, right? Your ID card already has a secure element. The third one is the local secure element in the mobile phone, which comes in two flavors either from apple of Google, but that's not a re those are not certified and are under control Google with Apple. So they're not the right security or you have a sim or an EIM or an external secure elements like it's called. And those are then on the mobile phones.

Now, if we compare all those, I've basically listed them here, then you see that if you want to scale, you will run into problems. Why? Because if you use the platforms of Google or Apple, then it's scalable. It's user-friendly.

It works, but it's not secure. So your government issued identity on the wallets of the users are under control of third party.

Now, if you use a local secure element for Samsung or from the, from your local telco, that means that you need to get access to that secure element. So that option doesn't scale either. But the biggest problem we will have right now is, is even if theoretically everybody gets their act together and does it, they need to build the chips, they need to certify the chips, and then we need to get them into the general population. And then of course you can use a smart car and then hold it to your mobile phone. But the user experience of that is questionable at best.

So now for instance, if we look at the current certification is the last thing that Apple publicly certified is the iPhone 13, right? And for Google only the Google Pixel phones on Androids are actually certified. So there is a population problem there. And now the RAF also defines a remote cryptographic device. And people basically have a more or less a, they are trained not to trust cloud-based stuff, right? So that means that there is a lot of, of of, of of paraic resistance on how that can work.

Now basically the GSMA actually had a very nice paper on this, is the core concept is, is that even if I have a secure element on a mobile phone, I still need to connect a wallet to the secure element or an app to the secure element to make it secure. That's called a trusted channel. So that means that what what actually happens is, is that I have a concept of a separation between keys that are device specific and keys that are user specific that are under that need to be under control of the user.

If I have a trusted channel from an application to a secure element, I can just separate them out. So that means now, now I have keys in the cloud that are under control of the mobile phone of the application of the user. So it basically acts as a, as a remote control of the keys in the cloud in combination with the device keys on the device. Now. And if you do build that properly and correctly, you can basically achieve so control as defined by the EU already in EI one. Now we are go, we are here to talk about scalable wallets.

So one piece of the puzzle of scalable wallets is actually having secure elements that scale and that work in the general population for all e for every person. But in order to do that, you also need scalable identity verification, right? So you you need to combine a government validated identity with a issued secure element remotely and unattended.

So that means that the, the, your pro, the problem basically becomes is how do I link an identity vetting event to a physical cryptographic stored based, hardware backed keys that basically where the problem reduces to, and we can actually already do it today because we already have a verifiable credential in our pocket and I showed it to you, right? We already have a passport.

And so what, what, what what this means is that you can actually hold your mobile phone to the passport, read the NFC chip, you have a a camera on the passport, you can match the verifiable photo of the, of your passport to your phone, and then with a remote secure element generated a key and basically have an attestation on that key. That's what we might call a pit or an identity A. So this is basically the introductory way of doing pits and wallets in the EU for EU digital wallet because we already have the passports, a lot of people have the passports.

And then of course there are different options. So some people have NFC in their passport is broken or maybe they don't have a passport, right? So then you can have your just normal either buy a passport or go to the municipality and get your identity verified and phone activated. So there are many options to scale. It also options to do differently.

Now, now Let's, let's, let's suppose that we are all successful, right? So now we have wallets. Everybody has wallets and we're using them. They're full issued with thousand verifiable credentials in them. We are verifying them across organizations. So that means that one of the functions my wallet will be having is, is that it's going to be tracking for me with whom I shared my data. I have my own personal right to be forgotten log.

So that means that it becomes trivial for me to disassociate with a verifier because I can just press a button and say, hello, I'm Boris, I shared my data, please forget me. Right? So that's one, one way. The other way is, is because I now have a strong digital identity, I go to a verifier and the verifier can just proclaim to me, I need these four pieces of data and I, and this is the providence I trust. So now with my digital identity, I can just go collect them for that transaction and I can do that either automatically or with consent or maybe I need to do additional stuff to get it.

And once I get it, I can present that to the verifier. What brings us to the, the next topic and that is now I have this data in my wallet and now I lost my phone, right?

So what, what does that actually mean? And that, that, that's actually to the relevant to the, to the talk that we just heard in the central states is where we have the concept of government, digital, public infrastructure, what we have a government, we have a, we have a military that's basically protecting the sovereignty of our borders, our geography. And now we're talking about your digital identity and your sovereignty online digitally. What does that mean? Who has a role in there and who's helping you?

So how can we fundamentally make sure that there is provenance in your identity and that when you go somewhere and you show your passport digitally, they know that's you and then you can get your data back or your wallet data, that's yours. You don't need to go to anybody, but you want to have a backup of your data or something like that where you say, okay, it's mine, give it back to me and nobody's allowed to view it except me. And then based on the concepts of so control, and you can do so control recovery.

And once you can do so recovery, now you have a new digital wallet, you can recover your data and then continue from where you left off. But it's a fundamental discussion we need to have with each other.

What is, what does recovery mean and how are we going to make an interaction between a government that does some kind of digital basic infrastructure, right? And then the hand over to the wallets and the wallet providers. And then at the end of the day, of course we are creating digital relationships. We are trying to create value in value chains. We are not doing digital identities because it's cool, of course for me it's cool because I'm a techie, but I mean that's not the value. The value is we are trying to reduce complex transactions that takes maybe months or maybe years.

We can reduce them to a couple of days. And that's the value that we're, we are digitizing complete value chains from start to finish. And that's where the actual value of all this is. So I'm Boris Garnov and basically we are here to help create scalable, secure user friendly wallets by providing you with the remote secure elements to have your cryptographic material stored under the so control of users.

Boris, thank you very much. Round of applause please for bars. Thank it was time for a quick question if anybody wants to delay lunch, there we go. Do I need that?

I, it might be slightly cheeky, but are we focusing on the wrong things here by spending so much time on level high security? You know, we have the, you had it on your chart yourself, Google and Apple, it's usable, it's, you know, scales and all that and it, you know, pass keys prevents phishing and aren't we almost there? And by doing what you're suggesting, maybe we're doing it great for German politicians that want level high, but the rest of us, you know, it's just too much work and we'll never get there.

The the problem is, is that the in apple and Google the platform doesn't, doesn't allow the wallet to connect properly into the secure element, right? So that means that your digital identity is not controlled by you. And the consequence of that is, is that that's why the politicians are worried is that if that goes wrong, you just basically put up your kits in adoption in Rwanda, you sold your house, you have a bunch of loans in your, in in Russia, and you have at least 2000 subscriptions signed up within a couple of minutes based on your strong digital identity. So what happen you Think?

Yeah, I mean that, that's what we are digitizing right now. We di we are starting to digitize the stuff that matters.

Yeah, Answer your question. I I tend to disagree, but that's, I I get your point.

So, and, and, and, and so, and, and the answer is, the question is is that how can we give you as a citizen enough control that you have agency digitally? So, because at the end of the day, we as humans, we as security professionals, we also have angst on, on, on, on, on interacting online because we know we cannot protect ourselves. We know that.

I mean, it, it's, that's the reality and the the question is, can can we give you just enough digital agency that you can protect yourself when it matters? Yeah.

Okay, thanks. Let's, I think actually everyone could do with some lunch. So thanks again, Boris, you, You, thank you very much and thank you very much for Express. See you Later.