Category: Personal

Passwords, password managers, and family life

Somehow, I always end up spending time writing about passwords when I even breach the subject on Twitter.

In this case, I’ve been asking around about password managers, as after many years with LastPass I want to reconsider if there is a better alternative, particularly as my needs have changed (or rather, are going to, in the not too distant future).

One of the thing that I’m looking for is a password manager that can generate diceware/xkcd-style passwords: a set of words in a certain language that are easy to say on (say) the phone, and type on systems where there is no password manager app. The reason for this is that there are a few places in which I need to be able to give the password to someone else who might not otherwise be trusted with the full password list. For instance the WiFi password for my apartment, or my mother’s house.

But it’s a bit more complicated than that. There are a number of situations where an account is not just an user. Or rather, you may want to allow h multiple users (people) to access the same account. Say for instance my energy provider’s dashboard. Or the phone provider. Or the online grocery shopping…

All of these things expect a single (billing) account, but they may rather be shared with a household than with a single individual. A few services do have a concept of a shared account, but very few do, and that makes less and less sense as the world progresses to such an everything-connected level.

I think it might be easy to figure out from the way I’ve been expressing this just above, but just to make sure not to leave “clues” rather than clear information that can be obviously be taken for public knowledge, I got to think about this because I have (finally, someone might say) found a soulmate. And while we don’t yet live together, I start to see the rough corners of these. We have not gotten to “What’s the Netflix password, again?” but I did end up changing the password to the account for Los Angeles transport card, to give her access, after setting it first with LastPass (we were visiting, and I added both of our TAP cards to the same account).

As I made clear earlier, part of this was a (minor) problem with my mother, too. But significantly less so: she never cared to have access to the power provider, phone company, and so on. Just as long as she had a copy of the invoices from time to time (which I solved by having a mailing list, which only the two of us subscribe to, as the contact address for all the services I use or used for the household in Italy).

Service providers take note: integrating with Google Drive or Dropbox so that the invoices get automatically added to a shared folder would be a lovely feature to have. And not just for households. I would love if it was easier to just have a copy of my invoices automatically added to, and indexed by, Google Drive.

But now, with a partner, it’s different. As the word implies, it’s a partnership, an equal standing. Once we will move in, we’ll share the expenses, and that means sharing the access to the accounts. Which means I don’t want to be the only one having the passwords. So I need a password manager that not only allows me to share the passwords easily, but also that allows her to use the passwords easily — which likely will translate to be able to read them off the phone, and type in a work computer’s incognito window (because she likely won’t be allowed to install the password manager on a work computer).

Which is why I’m looking for a new password manager: LastPass is actually fairly great when it comes to sharing passwords with other accounts. But it’s effectively useless when it comes to “typeable” passwords. Their “Make pronounceable” option is okay to make it easier to spell out, but I don’t want to have to use an eight-letters password to be able to type it easily, when I could just as easily use a three-words combination that is significantly stronger.

And while I could just use xkcdpass on my laptop and generate those shared passwords (which is what I did with my mother’s router), that does not really scale (it still keeps me as the gatekeeper), and it does not make the security usability for my SO. And it wouldn’t be fair to keep the password hygiene for me only.

Similarly, any solution that involves running personal infrastructure (servers, cron, git, whatever) is not an option: not only I’m increasingly not relying on it myself (I even gave up on running my own blog’s webapp!), but most of my family is not even slightly interested in figuring out how to do that. And I don’t blame the least, they have enough of their own things to care about.

If you have any suggestions for a new password manager, please do let me know. I think I may try 1Password next, if nothing else because I think Troy Hunt’s opinion is worth something, and if he backed 1Password, there has to be a reason.

FreeStyle Libre and first responders

Over on Twitter, a friend asked me a question related to the FreeStyle Libre, since he knew that I’m an user. I provided some “soundbite-shaped” answers on the thread but since I got a few more confused replies afterwards, I thought I would try to make the answer a bit more complete:

Let’s start with a long list of caveats here: I’m not a doctor, I’m not a paramedic, I do not work for or with Abbott, and I don’t speak for my employer. All the opinions that follow are substantiated only by my personal experiences and expertise, which is to say, I’m an user of the Libre system and I happen to be a former firmware engineer (in non-medical fields) and have a hobby of reverse engineering glucometer communication protocols. I will also point out that I have explicitly not looked deeply into the NFC part of the communication protocol, because (as I’ll explain in a minute), that crosses the line of what I feel comfortable releasing to the public.

Let me start with the immediate question that Ciarán asks in the tweet. No, the communication between the sensor and the reader device (or phone app) is not authenticated or protected by a challenge/response pair, as far as I know. From what I’ve been told (yes I’m talking through hearsay here, but give me a moment), the sensor will provide the response no matter who is asking. But the problem is what that response represent.

Unlike your average test strip based glucometer, the sensor does not record actual blood glucose numbers. Instead it reports a timeseries of raw values from different sensors. Pierre Vandevenne looked at the full response and shed some light onto the various other values provided by the sensor.

How that data is interpreted by the reader (or app) depends on its calibration, which happens in the first 60 minutes of operation of the sensor. Because of this, the official tools (reader and app) only allows you to scan a sensor with the tool that started it — special concessions are made for the app: a sensor started by a reader device can be also “tied” to the app, as long as you scan it with the app during the first hour of operation. It does not work the other way, so if you initialize with the app, you can’t use the reader.

While I cannot be certain that the reader/app doesn’t provide data to the sensor to allow you to do this kind of dual-initialization, my guess is that they don’t: the launch of the app was not tied with any change to the sensors, nor with warnings that only sensors coming from a certain lot and later models would work. Also, the app is “aware” of sensors primed by the reader, but not vice-versa, which suggests the reader’s firmware just wouldn’t allow you to scan an already primed sensor.

Here is one tidbit of information I’ll go back to later on. To use the app, you need to sign up for an account, and all the data from the sensor is uploaded to FreeStyle’s servers. The calibration data appears to be among the information shared on the account, which allows you to move the app you use to a new phone without waiting to replace the sensor. This is very important, because you don’t want to throw away your sensor if you break your phone.

The calibration data is then used together with non-disclosed algorithms (also called “curves” in various blogs) to produce the blood glucose equivalent value shown to the user. One important note here is that the reader and the app do not always agree on the value. While I cannot tell for sure what’s going on, my guess is that, as the reader’s firmware is not modifiable, the app contains newer version of the algorithms, and maybe a newer reader device would agree with the app. As I have decided not to focus on reversing the firmware of the reader, I have no answer there.

Can you get answers from the sensor without the calibration data? As I’m not sure what that data is, I can’t give a definite answer, but I will note that there are a number of unofficial apps out there that purport of doing exactly that. These are the same apps that I have, personally, a big problem with, as they provide zero guarantee that their results are at all precise or consistent, and scare the crap out of me, if you plan on making your life and health depend on them. Would the paramedics be able to use one of those apps to provide vague readings off a sensor? Possibly. But let me continue.

The original tweet by Eoghan asks Abbott if it would be possible for paramedics to have a special app to be able to read the sensor. And here is where things get complicated. Because yes, Abbott could provide such an app, as long as the sensor was initialized or calibration-scanned by the app within the calibration hour: their servers have the calibration data, which is needed to move the app between phones without losing data and without waiting for a new sensor.

But even admitting that there is no technical showstopper to such an app, there are many more ethical and legal concerns about it. There’s no way that the calibration data, and even the immediate value, wouldn’t be considered Sensitive Personal Data. This means for Abbott to be able to share it with paramedics, they would have to have a sharing agreement in place, with all the requirements that the GDPR impose them (for good reason).

Adding to this discussion, there’s the question of whether it would actually be valuable to paramedics to have this kind of information. Since I have zero training in the field, I can’t answer for sure, but I would be cautious about trusting the reading of the sensor, particularly if paramedics had to be involved.

The first warning comes from Abbott themselves, that recommend using blood-based test strips to confirm blood sugar readings during rapid glucose changes (in both directions). Since I’m neither trained in chemistry nor medicine, I don’t know why that is the case, but I have read tidbits that it has to do with the fact that the sensor reads values from interstitial fluid, rather than plasma, and the algorithms are meant to correlate the two values. Interstitial fluid measurements can lag behind the plasma ones and thus while the extrapolation can be correct for a smooth change, it might be off (very much so) when they change suddenly.

And as a personal tale, I have experienced the Libre not reporting any data, and then reporting very off values, after spending a couple of hours in very cold environment (in Pittsburgh, at -14°C). Again, see Vandevenne’s blog for what’s going on there with temperatures and thermal compensation.

All in all, I think that I would trust better a single fingerprick to get a normal test-strip result, both because it works universally, whether you do have a sensor or not, and because its limitations are much better understood both by their users and the professionals. And they don’t need to have so many ethical and legal implications to use.

Two words about my personal policy on GitHub

I was not planning on posting on the blog until next week, trying to stick on a weekly schedule, but today’s announcement of Microsoft acquiring GitHub is forcing my hand a bit.

So, Microsoft is acquiring GitHub, and a number of Open Source developers are losing their mind, in all possible ways. A significant proportion of comments on this that I have seen on my social media is sounding doomsday, as if this spells the end of GitHub, because Microsoft is going to ruin it all for them.

Myself, I think that if it spells the end of anything, is the end of the one-stop-shop to work on any project out there, not because of anything Microsoft did or is going to do, but because a number of developers are now leaving the platform in protest (protest of what? One company buying another?)

Most likely, it’ll be the fundamentalists that will drop their projects away to GitHub. And depending on what they decide to do with their projects, it might even not show on anybody’s radar. A lot of people are pushing for GitLab, which is both an open-core self-hosted platform, and a PaaS offering.

That is not bad. Self-hosted GitLab instances already exist for VideoLAN and GNOME. Big, strong communities are in my opinion in the perfect position to dedicate people to support core infrastructure to make open source software development easier. In particular because it’s easier for a community of dozens, if not hundreds of people, to find dedicated people to work on it. For one-person projects, that’s overhead, distracting, and destructive as well, as fragmenting into micro-instances will cause pain to fork projects — and at the same time, allowing any user who just registered to fork the code in any instance is prone to abuse and a recipe for disaster…

But this is all going to be a topic for another time. Let me try to go back to my personal opinions on the matter (to be perfectly clear that these are not the opinions of my employer and yadda yadda).

As of today, what we know is that Microsoft acquired GitHub, and they are putting Nat Friedman of Xamarin fame (the company that stood behind the Mono project after Novell) in charge of it. This choice makes me particularly optimistic about the future, because Nat’s a good guy and I have the utmost respect for him.

This means I have no intention to move any of my public repositories away from GitHub, except if doing so would bring a substantial advantage. For instance, if there was a strong community built around medical devices software, I would consider moving glucometerutils. But this is not the case right now.

And because I still root most of my projects around my own domain, if I did move that, the canonical URL would still be valid. This is a scheme I devised after getting tired of fixing up where unieject ended up with.

Microsoft has not done anything wrong with GitHub yet. I will give them the benefit of the doubt, and not rush out of the door. It would and will be different if they were to change their policies.

Rob’s point is valid, and it would be a disgrace if various governments would push Microsoft to a corner requiring it to purge content that the smaller, independent GitHub would have left alone. But unless that happens, we’re debating hypothetical at the same level of “If I was elected supreme leader of Italy”.

So, as of today, 2018-06-04, I have no intention of moving any of my repositories to other services. I’ll also use a link to this blog with no accompanying comment to anyone who will suggest I should do so without any benefit for my projects.

The dot-EU kerfuffle — or how EURid is messing with their own best supporters

TL;DR summary: be very careful if you use a .eu domain as your point of contact for anything. If you’re thinking of registering a .eu domain to use as your primary domain, just don’t.

I have forecasted a rant when I pointed out I changed domain with my move to WordPress.

I have registered flameeyes.eu nearly ten years ago, part of the reason was because flameeyes.com was (at the time) parked to a domain squatter, and part because I have been a strong supported of the European Union.

In those ten years I started using the domain not just for my website, but as my primary contact email. It’s listed as my contact address everywhere, I have all kind of financial, commercial and personal services attached to that email. It’s effectively impossible for me to ever detangle from it, even if I spend the next four weeks doing nothing but amending registrations — some services just don’t allow you to ever change email address; many requires you to contact support and spend time talking with a person to get the email updated on the account.

And now, because I moved to the United Kingdom, which decided to leave the Union, the Commission threatens to prevent me from keeping my domain. It may sound obvious, since EURid says

A website with a .eu or .ею domain name extension tells your customers that you are a legal entity based in the EU, Iceland, Liechtenstein or Norway and are therefore, subject to EU law and other relevant trading standards.

But at the same time it now provides a terrible collapse of two worlds: technical and political. The idea that you any entity in control of a .eu domain is by requirement operating under EU law sounds good on paper… until you come to this corner case where a country leaves the Union — and now either you water down this promise, eroding trust in the domain by not upholding this law domain, or you end up with domain takeover, eroding trust in the domain on technical merit.

Most of the important details for this are already explained in a seemingly unrelated blog post by Hanno Böck: Abandoned Domain Takeover as a Web Security Risk. If EURid will forbid renewal of .eu domains for entities that are no longer considered part of the EU, a whole lot of domains will effectively be “up for grabs”. Some may currently be used as CDN aliases, and be used to load resources on other websites; those would be the worst, as they would allow the controller of the domains to inject content in other sites that should otherwise be secure.

But even more important for companies that used their .eu domain as their primary point of contact: think of any PO, or invoice, or request for information, that would be sent to a company email address — and now think of a malicious actor getting access to those communications! This is not just the risk that me (and any other European supporter who happened to live in the UK, I’m sure I’m not alone) as a single individual have — it’s a possibly unlimited amount of scams that people would be subjected to, as it would be trivial to pass for a company, once their domain is taken over!

As you can see from the title, I think this particular move is also going to hit the European supporters the most. Not just because of those individuals (like me!) who wanted to signal how they feel part of something bigger than their country of birth, but also because I expect a number of UK companies used .eu domain specifically to declare themselves open to European customers — as otherwise, between pricing in Sterling, and a .co.uk domain, it would always feel like buying “foreign goods”. Now those companies, that believed in Europe, find themselves in the weakest of positions.

Speaking of individuals, when I read the news I had a double-take, and had to check the rules for .eu domains again. At first I assumed that something was clearly wrong: I’m a European Union citizen, surely I will be able to keep my domain, no matter where I live! Unfortunately, that’s not the case:

In this first step the Registrant must verify whether it meets the General
Eligibility Criteria, whereby it must be:
(i) an undertaking having its registered office, central administration or
principal place of business within the European Union, Norway, Iceland
or Liechtenstein, or
(ii) an organisation established within the European Union, Norway, Iceland
or Liechtenstein without prejudice to the application of national law, or
(iii) a natural person resident within the European Union, Norway, Iceland or
Liechtenstein.

If you are a European Union citizen, but you don’t want your digital life to ever be held hostage by the Commission or your country’s government playing games with it, do not use a .eu domain. Simple as that. EURid does not care about the well-being of their registrants.

If you’re a European company, do think twice on whether you want to risk that a change in government for the country you’re registered in would lead you to open both yourself, your suppliers and your customers into the a wild west of overtaken domains.

Effectively, what EURid has signalled with this is that they care so little about the technical hurdles of their customers, that I would suggest against ever relying on a .eu domain for anyone at all. Register it as a defense against scammers, but don’t do business on it, as it’s less stable than certain microstate domains, or even the more trendy and modern gTLDs.

I’ll call this a self-goal. I still trust the European Union, and the Commission, to have the interests of the many in their mind. But the way they tried to apply a legislative domain to the .eu TLD was brittle at best to begin with, and now there’s no way out of here that does not ruin someone’s day, and erode the trust in that very same domain.

It’s also important to note that most of the bigger companies, those that I hear a lot of European politicians complain about, would have no problem with something like this: just create a fully-own subsidiary somewhere in Europe, say for instance Slovakia, and have it hold onto the domain. And have it just forward onto a gTLD to do business on, so you don’t even give the impression of counting on that layer of legislative trust.

Given the scary damage that would be caused by losing control over my email address of ten years, I’m honestly considering looking for a similar loophole. The cost of establishing an LLC in another country, firmly within EU boundaries, is not pocket money, but it’s still chump change compared to the amount of damage (financial, reputation, relationships, etc) that it would be a good investment.

UK Banking, Attempt 3: Tesco Bank (and the Irish credit card)

It feels like most of what I end up writing nowadays is my misadventures across a wide range of financial service companies. But here we go (I promise I’ll go back writing about reverse engineering Really Soon Now™).

The last post on this topic was my rant, about how Fineco lacks some basic tools to be used as sole, or primary bank account in the UK. Hopefully they will address this soon, and a sane bank will be available in this country, but for now I had to find alternatives.

Since the various Fintech companies also don’t provide the features I needed, I found myself having to find a “high street bank”. And since my experience up to this point both with Barclays and NatWest was not particularly positive, I decided to look for a different option. Since I have been a mostly-happy customer of Tesco Bank for nearly four years, I decided to give their UK service a try.

At first it appeared to have an online sign-up flow that looked sweet for this kind of problem… except at the end of it, they told me to wait for them to ask me for paperwork to send them through. Turns out the request was for proof of identity (which needs to be certified) and proof of address (which needs to be in original) — the letter and form I could swear is the same that they sent me when I applied for the Irish credit card, except the information is now correct (in Ireland, the Garda will not certify a passport copy, though it appears the UK police forces would).

Let’s ignore the fact that by mailing me at that address, Tesco Bank provided their own proof of address, and let’s focus instead on the fact that they do not accept online print outs, despite almost every service (and, as I found out now, themselves) defaulting to paperless bills and statements. I actually have had a number of bills being mailed to me, including from Hounslow Council, so I have a wide range of choices of what to provide them, but as it turns out, I like a challenge and having some fun with corner cases (particularly as I already solved the immediate need for a bank account by the time I looked into this, but that’s a story for another day).

Here is a part of the story I have not told yet. When I moved to the UK I expected to have to close every account I had still in Ireland, both because Ulster Bank Private is a bloody expensive service, and because at least in Italy I was told I was not entitled to keep credit cards open after I left the country. So as soon as I was in working order over here, I switched over all the billings to Revolut. Unfortunately I couldn’t do that for at least three services (Online.net, Vodafone Italy and Wind/3 Italy) — in two cases because they insist they do not accept anything but Italian cards, while somehow still accepting Tesco Ireland cards.

While trying to figure out an ad-interim solution I got to find out that Tesco Bank has no problem with me still having the “Irish” credit card, and they even allowed me to change the address (and phone number) on file to my new London one. We had some snag regarding the SEPA direct debit, but once I pointed out that they were suggesting breaching the SEPA directives, all was good and indeed the card is debited to the EUR Fineco account.

This also means i get that card’s statements to my London address. So of course I ended up sending, to Tesco Bank, as proof of address… a Tesco Bank Ireland credit card statement. As a way of saying “Do you feel silly enough, now?” to whoever had to manually verify my address and send the paperwork back to me. Turns out it worked just fine, and I got not even a passive aggressive note about it.

Now let’s put aside the registration and let’s take a look at the services provided. Because if I have to rant, I would like at least to rant with some information to others to make up their own mind.

First off, as I said, the first part of the registration is online, after which they get in touch with you to send them the proofs they need. It’s very nice that during the whole time, they “keep in touch” by SMS: they remind you to send the paperwork back, they tell you that the account was open before you receive the snail mail, and so on.

I got a lot of correspondence from Tesco Bank: in addition to the request of proofs, and the proofs being mailed back, I received a notification about the account being opened, the debit card PIN, and a “temporary access number” to sign up online. The debit card arrived separately and through a signature-required delivery. This is a first for me in the UK, as most other cards just got sent through normal mail — except for Fineco, as they used Fedex, and they let me receive it directly at the office, despite it not being the proof of address I sent them.

Once signing up for the online banking, they ask you for an 8-digits security code, a long(er) password, and a selection of verbal question/answers, that are the usual terrible security (so as usual I’ve answered them at random and noted down what I told them the answers were). They allow you to choose your username, but they suggest it to stay the email address on file.

The login for the first time from a different computer is extremely awkward: it starts with two digits of the security code, followed by a SMS second factor authentication, followed by the password (not a subset thereof, so you can use a password manager easily for this one), all through different forms. The same happens for the Mobile Banking application (which is at least linked directly from their website, and very easy to install). The mobile banking login appears to work fairly reliably (and you’ll see on the next post why I call this out explicitly).

I set up the rent standing order on this account, and it was a straightforward and painless process, which is the same as a one-time transaction, except for saying “I want to repeat this every month” checkbox. All in all, it looks to me like it’s a saner UI than Barclays, and proper enough for the needs I have. I will report back if there is anything particularly different from this that I find over time, of course.

UK Banking, Fineco is not enough

You may remember that the last time I blogged about UK banking I had just dismissed Barclays in favour of Fineco, the Italian investment bank, branch of UniCredit, This seemed a good move, both because people spoke very good of Fineco in my circles, at least in Italy, and because the sign up flow seemed so good that it sounded like a good idea.

I found out almost right away that something was not quite perfect for the UK market, in particular because there was (and is) no way to set up a standing order, which is the standard way to pay for your rent in the UK (and Ireland, for what it’s worth). But it seemed a minor thing to worry about, as the rest of the features of the bank (ability to spend up to £10k in a single transaction by requesting an explicit lift on the card limits with SMS authentication, just to say one).

Unfortunately, a couple of months later I know for sure it is not possible to use Fineco as a primary account in the UK at all. There are two problems, the first being very much a problem to anyone, and the second being a problem for my situation. I’ll start with the first one: direct debit support.

The direct debit system, for those not used to it in Europe, is one where you give a “debtor” (usually, an utility service, such as your ISP or power company) your account details (Sort Code and Account Number in the case of the UK), and they will tell the bank to give them money at certain time of the month. And it is the way Jeremy Clarkson lost £200, ten years ago. There is a nearly identical system in the rest of the EU, called SEPA Direct Debit (with SDD Core being the more commonly known about, as it deals with B2C, business-to-consumer) debits.

After I opened the Fineco account, I checked on Payments UK’s Sort Code Checker which features were enabled for it (30-02-48) and then, as well as the time of writing, it says «Bacs Direct Debits can be set up on this sort code.» So I had no refrain in closing my Barclays account and moving all the money into the newly created account. All of my utilities were more than happy to do so, except for ThamesWater that refused to let me set up the debit online. Turns out they were the only ones with a clue.

Indeed, when in January the first debit was supposed to land, instead of seeing the debit on the statement, I saw a BACS credit of the same amount. I contacted my ISP (Hyperoptic, with the awesome customer support) to verify if something failed on their side, but they didn’t see anything amiss for them. When even Netflix showed up the same way, and both of the transaction showed up an “entry reversal” of the same amount, I knew something was off with the bank and contacted them, originally to no avail.

Indeed, a few more debits showed up the same way, so I have been waiting for the shoe to drop, which it did at the end of January, when Fineco sent me an email (or actually, a ticket, it even has a ticket number!) telling me that they processed the debits as a one-off, but to cancel them because they won’t do this again. This was professional of them, particularly as this way it does not hit my credit score at all, but it still is a major pain in the neck.

My first hope was to be able to just use Revolut to pay the direct debits, since they are all relatively low amounts, which fit my usual auto top-up strategy. When you look at the Revolut information page with your account details for GBP, the text says explicitly «Use this personal UK current account to get salary and to pay bills», which brought me hope, and indeed the Payment UK’s checker also confirmed that it supposedly accepts Bacs Direct Debit. But when I checked with the in-app chat support, I was told that, no Revolut does not support direct debits, which makes that phrase extremely misleading. At least TransferWise explicitly denies supporting Direct Debit in the sort code checker, kudos to them.

The next problem with Fineco is not actually their fault, but is still due to them not having the “full features” of a UK high street bank. I got contacted by Dexters, the real estate company that among other things manages my apartment and collects my rent. While they told me the money arrived all good when I moved to Fineco (I asked them explicitly), they sent me a scary and threatening email (after failing to reach me on the phone, I was going to be charged excessively high roaming charges to answer an unknown number)… because £12 were missing from my payment. The email exchange wasn’t particularly productive (I sent them a photo of the payment confirmation, they told me «[they] received a large sum of money[sic] however it is £12.00 that is outstanding on the account.» So I called them on Monday, and they managed to confirm that it was actually £6 missing in December, and another £6 missing in January.

Throwing this around with colleague, and then discussing with a more reasonable person from Dexters on the phone, we came to figure out that Barclays (as the bank used by Dexters to receive the rent) is charging them £6 to receive these transfers because they are “international” — despite the fact that they are indeed local, it appears Barclays apply that fee for any transfer received over the SWIFT network rather than through the Faster Payments system used by most of the other UK banks. I didn’t want to keep arguing with Dexters over the fact that it’s their bank charging them the fee, I paid the extra £12, and decided to switch the rent payment over to the new account as well. I really dislike Barclays.

I’ll post later this month on the following attempts with other bank accounts. For now I decided that I’ll keep getting my salary into Fineco, and keep a running balance on the “high street” account for the direct debits, and the rent. Right now for my only GBP credit card (American Express) I still pay the balance off Fineco via debit card payment anyway, because the credit limit they gave me is quite limited for my usual spending, particularly now that I can actually charge that card when booking flights on BA without having to spend extra money in fees.

Barclays and the single factor authentication

In my previous post on the topic I have barely touched on one of the important reasons why I did not like Barclays at all. The reason for that was that I still had money into my account with them, and I wanted to make sure that was taken care of before lamenting further on the state of their security. As I managed to close my account now, I should go on and discuss this further, even though I have touched upon the major topics of this.

Barclays online banking system relies heavily on what I would define as “single factor authentication”.

Usually, you define authentication factors as things you have or things you know. In the case of Barclays, the only thing they effectively rely upon is “access to the debit card”. Okay, technically you could say that by itself it’s a two-factor system, as it requires access to the debit card and to its PIN. And since the EMV-CAP protocol they use for this factor executes directly on the chipcard, it is not susceptible to the usual PIN-stripping attacks as most card fraud with chip-and-pin cards uses.

But this does not count for much when the PIN of the card they issued me was 7766 — and to lament of that is why I waited to close the account and give them back the card. It seems like there’s a pattern of banks issuing “easy to remember” 4-digit PINs: XYYX, XXYY, etc. One of my previous (again, cancelled) cards had a PIN terribly easy to remember for a computerist, at least not for the average person though: 0016.

Side note: I have read someone suggesting to badly scribbled a wrong PIN on the back of a card as a theft prevention. Though I like that idea, I’m just afraid the banks won’t like it anyway. Also it would take some work to make the scribble being easily misunderstood for different digits so that they can try the three times needed to block it.

You access Barclays online banking account through the use of the Identify method provided by CAP, which means you put the card into the reader, provide the PIN, and you get an 8-digits identifier that can be used to login on the website. Since I’m no expert of how CAP works internally, I will only venture a guess that this is similar to a counter-based OTP, as the card has no access to a real-time clock, and there is no challenge provided for this information.

This account access sounds secure, but it’s really not any more secure than an username and password, at least when it comes to dealing with phishing. You may think that producing a façade that shows the full Barclays login, and proxies the responses in real time is a lot of work, but the phishing tools are known for being flexible, and they don’t really need to reproduce the whole website, just the parts they care about getting data from. The rest can easily be proxied as it is without any further change, of course.

So what can we do once you can fool someone into logging in to the bank? Well, you can’t really do much, as most of the actions require further CAP confirmation: wires, new standing orders, and so on so forth. You can, though, get a lot of information about the victim, including enough proofs of address or identity that you can really mess with their life. It also makes it possible to cancel things like standing orders to pay for rent, which would be quite messy to deal with for most people — although most of the phishing is not done for the purpose of messing with people, and more to get their money.

As I said, for sending money you need to have access to the CAP codes. That includes having access not only to the device itself, but also the card and the PIN. To execute those transactions, Barclays will ask you to sign a transaction by providing the CAP device with the account number and the amount to wire. This is good and it’s pretty hard to tamper with, hopefully (I do not make any guarantee on the implementation of CAP), so even if you’re acting through a proxy-phishing site, your wires are probably safe.

I say probably, because the way the challenge-response is implemented, only the 8-digits account number is used during the signature. If the phishers are attacking a victim that they studied for long enough, which may be the case when attacking businesses, you could know which account they pay every month manually, and set up an account with the same number at a different bank (different sort code). The signature would be valid for both.

To be fair to Barclays, implementing the CAP fully, the way they did here, is actually more secure than what Ulster Bank (and I assume the rest of RBS Group) does, with an opaque “challenge” token. While this may encode more information, the fact that it’s opaque means there is no way for the user to know whether what they are signing is indeed what they meant to.

Now, these mitigations are actually good. They require continuous access to the card on request, and that makes it very hard for phishing to just keep using the site in the background after the user logged in. But they still rely on effectively a single factor. If someone gets a hold of the card and the PIN (and we know at least some people will write the real one on the back of the card), then it’s game over: it’s like the locks on my flat’s door: two independent locks… except they use the same key. Sure, it’s a waste of time to pick both, so it increases the chances a neighbour would walk in on wannabe burglars trying to open the apartment door. But there’s a single key, I can’t just use two separate keychains to make sure a thief would only grab one of the two, and if anyone gets it from me, well, it’s game over.

Of course Barclays knows that this is not enough, so they include a risk engine. If something in the transactions don’t comply with their profile of your activity, it’s considered risky and they require an additional verification. This verification happens to be in form of text messages. I will not suggest that the problem with these is with GSM-layer attacks, as that is still not (yet) in the hands of the type of criminals aiming at personal bank accounts, but there is at the very least the risk that a thieve would get a handle of my bag with both my card and my phone, so the only “factors” that are still in my head, rather than tied to the physical objects, are the (provided) PIN of the card, and the PIN of the phone.

This profile fitting is actually the main reason why I got frustrated with Barclays: since I had just opened the account, most of the transactions were all “exceptional”, and that is extremely annoying. This was compounded by the fact that my phone provider didn’t even let me receive SMS from the office, due to lack of coverage (now fixed), and the fact that at least for wires, the Barclays UI does not warn you to check your phone!

There is also the problem with the way Barclays handle these “exceptional transactions”: debit card transactions are out-and-out rejected. The Verified by Visa screen tells you to check your phone, but the phone will only ask you if it was your transaction or not, and after you confirm it is, it’ll ask you to “retry in a couple of minutes” — retrying too quickly will lead to the transactions being blocked by the processor directly, with a temporary card lock. The wire transfer one will unblock the execution of the wire, which is good, but it can also push the wire to after the cut-off time for non-“Faster Payments” wires.

Update (2017-12-30): since I did not make this very clear, I have added a note about this at the bottom of my new post, about the fact hat confirming these transactions only need you to spoof the sender, since the content and destination of the text message to send are known (it only has to say “Y”, and it’s always to the same service number). So this validation should not really count as a second factor authentication for a skilled attacker.

These are all the reasons for which I abandoned Barclays as fast as I could. Some of those are actually decent mitigation strategies, but the fact that they do not really increase security, while increasing inconvenience, makes me doubt the validity of their concerns and threat models.

New, new gamestation

Full disclosure: the following posts has a significantly higher amount of Amazon Affiliates links than usual. That’s because I am talking about the hardware I just bought, and this post counts just as much as an update on my hardware as a recommendation on the stuff I bought, I have not gotten hacked or bought out by anyone.

As I noted in my previous quick update, my gamestation went missing in the move. I would even go as far as to say that it was stolen, but I have no way to prove whether it was stolen by the movers or during the move. This meant that I needed to get a new computer for my photo editing hobby, which meant more money spent, and still no news from the insurance. But oh well.

As for two years ago, I wanted to post here the current hardware setup I have. You’ll notice a number of similarities with the previous configuration, because I decided to stick as much as possible to what I had before, that worked.

  • CPU: Intel Core i7 7820X, which still has a nice 3.6GHz base clock, and has more cores than I had before.
  • Motherboard: MSI X299 SLI PLUS. You may remember that I had problems with the ASUS motherboard.
  • Memory: 8×Crucial 16GB DDR4.
  • Case: Fractal Design Define S, as I really like the designs of Fractal Design (pun not intended), and I do not need the full cage or the optical disk bays for sure this time around.
  • CPU cooler: NZXT Kraken X52, because the 280mm version appears to be more aimed towards extreme overclockers than my normal usage; this way I had more leeway on how to mount the radiator in.
  • SSD: 2×Crucial MX300 M.2 SATA. While I liked the Samsung 850 EVO, the performance of the MX300 appear to be effectively the same, and this allowed me to get the M2 version, leaving more space if I need to extend this further.
  • HDD: Toshiba X300 5TB because there is still need for spinning rust to archive data that is “at rest”.
  • GPU: Zotac GeForce GTX 1080Ti 11GB, because since I’m spending money I may just as well buy a top of the line card and be done with it.
  • PSU: Corsair RM850i, for the first time in years betraying beQuiet! as they didn’t have anything in stock at the time I ordered this.

This is the configuration in the chassis, but that ended up not being enough. In particular, because of my own stupidity, I ended up having to replace my beloved Dell U2711 monitor. I really like my UltraSharp, but earlier this year I ended up damaging the DisplayPort input on it — friends don’t let friends use DisplayPort with hooks on them! Get those without for extra safety, particularly if you have monitor arms or standing desks! Because of this I have been using a DVI-D DualLink cable instead. Unfortunately my new videocard (and most new videocard I could see) do not have DVI ports anymore, preferring instead multiple DisplayPort and (not even always) HDMI output. The UltraSharp, unfortunately, does not support 2560×1440 output over HDMI, and the DisplayPort-to-DVI adapter in the box is only for SingleLink DVI, which is not fast enough for that resolution either. DualLink DVI adapters exist, but for the most part they are “active” converters that require a power supply and more cables, and are not cheap (I have seen a “cheap” one for £150!)

I ended up buying a new monitor too, and I settled for the BenQ BL2711U, a 27 inches, 4k, 10-bit monitor “for designers” that boasts a 100% sRGB coverage. This is not my first BenQ monitor; a few months ago I bought a BenQ BL2420PT, a 24 inches monitor “for designers” that I use for both my XPS and for my work laptop, switching one and the other as needed over USB-C, and I have been pretty happy with it altogether.

Unfortunately the monitor came with DisplayPort cables with hooks, once again, so at first I decided to connect it over HDMI instead. And that was a big mistake, for multiple reasons. The first is that calibrating it with the ColorMunki was showing a huge gap between the colours uncalibrated and calibrated. The second was that, when I went to look into it, I could not enable 10-bit (10 bpc) mode in the NVIDIA display settings.

Repeat after me: if you want to use a BL-series BenQ monitor for photography you should connect it using DisplayPort.

The two problems were solved after switching to DisplayPort (temporarily with hooks, and ordered a proper cable already): 10bpc mode is not available over HDMI when using 4k resolution and 60Hz. HDMI 2 can do 4k and 10-bit (HDR) but only at lower framerate, which makes it fine for watching HDR movies and streaming, but not good for photo editing. The problem with the calibration was the same problem I noticed, but couldn’t be bothered figuring out how to fix, on my laptops: some of the gray highlighting of text would not actually be visible. For whatever reason, BenQ’s “designer” monitors ship with the HDMI colour range set to limited (16-235) rather than full (0-255). Why did they do that? I have no idea. Indeed switching the monitor to sRGB mode, full range, made the calibration effectively unnecessary (I still calibrated it out of nitpickery), and switching to DisplayPort removes the whole question on whether it should use limited or full range.

While the BenQ monitors have fairly decent integrated speakers, which make it unnecessary to have a soundbar for hearing system notifications or chatting with my mother, that is not the greatest option to play games on. So I ended up getting a pair of Bose Companion 2 speakers which are more than enough for what I need to use them for.

Now I have an overly powerful computer, and a very nice looking monitor. How do I connect them to the Internet? Well, here’s the problem: the Hyperoptic socket is in the living room, way too far from my computer to be useful. I could have just put a random WiFi adapter on it, but I also needed a new router anyway, since the box with my fairly new Linksys also got lost in the moving process.

So upon suggestion from a friend, and a recommendation from Troy Hunt I ended up getting a UAP-AC-PRO for the living room, and a UAP-AC-LITE for the home office, topped it with an EdgeRouter X (the recommendation of which was rescinded afterwards, but it seems to do its job for now), and set them as a bridge between the two locations. I think I should write down networking notes later, but Troy did that already so why bother?

So at the end of this whole thing I spent way more money on hardware than I planned to, I got myself a very new nice computer, and I have way too many extra cables than I need, plus the whole set of odds and ends of the old computer, router and scanner that are no longer useful (I still have the antennas for the router, and the power supply for the scanner). And I’m still short of the document scanner, which is a bit of a pain because I now have a collection of documents that need scanning. I could use the office’s scanners, but those don’t run OCR for the documents, and I have not seen anything decent to apply OCR to PDFs after the fact, I’m open to suggestions as I’m not sure I’m keen on ending up buying something like the EPSON DS-310 just for the duplex scanning and the OCR software.

UK Banking, Attempt 2: Fineco Bank

So after a fairly negative experience with Barclays I have been quickly looking for alternatives. Two acquaintances who don’t know each other both suggested me to look into Fineco, which is an Italian bank also operating in the United Kingdom. As you can tell from their website, their focus is on trading and traders, but turns out they also make a fairly decent bank in and by themselves.

Indeed, opening the account with Fineco has been fairly straightforward: a few online forms, uploading documents to their identity verification system (very similar to what Revolut does, except using an Italian company that I already knew and was a customer of), and then sending £1 from a bank account that is already opened in your name. I found the forms also technically well-designed, particularly the fact that all the “I agree to” checkboxes automatically trigger JavaScript downloads of PDFs with the terms agreed, whether you clicked to read the agreement or not — I guess it’s a «No excuse, you have a copy of this» protection on their side, but it also made it very easy to archive all the needed information together with everything else I keep.

I should note here that it looks like Fineco’s target audience is Italian expats in the UK explicitly. It is common for most services to “special case” their local country as the first entry in the country drop-down, and then add the rest in alphabetical order. In the case of Fineco, the drop-down started with United Kingdom and Italy for all the options.

One of the good thing about this bank being focused so much on trading is that the account is by default a multicurrency one, similar to TransferWise Borderless Account. Indeed, in addition to the primary Sterling account, Fineco sets you up right away with accounts in Euro, Swiss Francs, and US Dollars, all connected to the same login. And in addition to this, they offer you the choice between a Sterling debit card, an Euro credit card, or both (for a reasonable fee of £10/yr). The two debit cards that are connected to the respective currency accounts (and no card is available for Francs or Dollars), and there are no foreign transaction fees for the two. While Revolut mostly took care of my foreign transaction fees, it’s always good to have a local debit card with a much higher availability, particularly as ATM access for Revolut has a relatively low monthly limit.

One of the interesting details of these currency accounts is that they all have Italian IBAN and BIC (with a separate SWIFT routing number, of its parent group UniCredit). For the main Sterling account, UK-style Sort Code and Account Number are available, which make it a proper local account.

This is actually very useful for me: for the past four years I have been keeping my old Italian account open, despite it costing me a fair bit of money just in service, because I have been paying the utilities for my mother’s house. And despite SEPA Direct Debit having been introduced over two years ago, the utilities I contacted failed to let me debit a foreign (Irish) account. Since I left Ireland, and the UK is not a Euro country, I was afraid I would have to keep my Italian account open even longer, but this actually solved the problem: for Italian utilities, the account is a perfectly valid Italian account, as for the most part they don’t even validate the billing address.

An aside: Vodafone Italy and Wind 3 Italy are still attached to my Tesco credit card, which Tesco Bank assures me I can keep using as long as I direct debit it into an Euro account anywhere. They even changed my mailing address to my new apartment in London. Those two companies insist that they only ever accept Italian credit cards, but they accepted my Irish credit card just fine before; in the case of Vodafone, they have an explicit whitelist of the BIN (for whatever reason), while Wind couldn’t get a hold of the concept that the card is Irish at all. Oh well.

Speaking of direct debits and odd combinations, while I should have now managed to switch all the utilities, including the council tax, to direct debit on this new account, I had some trouble doing the setup with Thameswater, the water provider in my area. If I tried setting up the direct debit online, it would report Fineco’s sort code (30-02-48) as invalid. The Sort Code Checker provided by the category association says it’s valid and it works for everything beside the cheque and credit clearing (which is unneeded). I ended up having to call them and ask them to override the warning, but they have not sent me confirmation that they managed. This appears to be a common “feature” of Thameswater — oh and by the way their paper form to request the direct debit was a 404 response on their website. Sigh.

The UI of the bank (and of their app) is much more information-dense than any other bank I’ve ever used. It’s not a surprise when you consider that they their target audience is investors and traders. It does work well for me, but I can see how this would not be the most pleasing interface for most home users. The only feature I have been unable to find yet in the interface is how to set up standing orders – I contacted them this weekend and will see what they say – so for the moment I just set up a few months worth of rent as scheduled payments, which work just as fine for the moment.

The Android app supports fingerprint authentication (unlike Barclay’s) and does not come with its own NFC payment system. Unfortunately the debit cards also appear not to be enabled for Android Pay, which is a bit of a shame. They also don’t leverage the app to send notifications, but they do send free SMS for new offline1 transactions happening on the debit card, which is great.

All in all, I may have found the bank I was looking for. It’s not a “cuddly” bank, but it appears to have what I need and it appears to work for my needs. With a bit of luck it will mean by Q1 I’ll be done with all the other bank accounts in both Ireland and Italy, and finally it’ll be simpler to keep an eye onto how much money I have and how much of it is spent around the place (although GnuCash does help a bit there). I’ll keep you all posted if this changes.

  1. Confusingly enough, a transaction happening over the Internet is an “offline” transaction. The online/offline is referred to the chip for chip’n’pin cards. If the chip is connected to a terminal that is in turn connected to the bank, that’s an online transaction. Otherwise it’s offline. If you read or type the number manually, it’s also offline.
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UK Banking, Attempt 1: Barclays

You may remember that back in August, I tried opening a NatWest account while not living in the UK yet, and hit a stonewall of an impossible declaration being required by the NatWest employees. I gave up on setting up a remote account, and waited to open one once I got in the country. Since the Northern Irish account seemed to be good for all I needed to do (spoiler: it wasn’t), I decided to wait for the Barclays representative to show up on my official starting date, and set up a “Premier” account with them.

The procedure, that sounded very “special” beforehand, turned out to just be a “Here is how you fill in the forms on the website”. Then, instead of sending you to a local branch to get your documents copied and stamped (something that appears to be very common in the British Isles), they had three people doing the stamping on a pre-made copy of the passport. Not particularly special, but at least practical, right?

Except they also said it would take a few day for the card, but over a week to have access the online banking as they need to “send me more stuff”. The forms were filled in on Monday, set up by Tuesday, and the card arrived on Wednesday, with the PIN following on Thursday. At that point I guessed that what else they told me to wait for was a simple EMV CAP device (I did not realise that the Wikipedia page had a Barclays device as an example, until I looked to link it over here), and decided to not wait, instead signing up for the online banking using my Ulster Bank CAP device, which worked perfectly fine.

On the Friday I also tried installing the Barclays app on my phone. As you probably all noticed by now, looking for a new app from the Play Store is risky, particularly when banking is involved, so I wanted to get a link to it from their website. Turns out that the Barclays website includes a link to the Apple App Store page for their app, but not for the Google Play one. Instead, the Play Store badge image is not clickable. Instead the option they give you is to provide your phone number and they will send you a link to the app as a text message. When I tried doing so, I got an error message suggesting to check my connection.

The reason for the error became apparent with developer tools open: the request to send the SMS is sent to a separate app running on a different hostname. And that host has a different certificate than their main website, which at that point was expired for at least four days! Indeed, since then, the certificate has been replaced with a new one, an EV certificate signed by Entrust, rather than Symantec as they had before. I do find it slightly disconcerting that they have no monitoring on the validity of the certificates for all of their websites, as a bank. But let’s move on.

The online banking relies heavily on “PINSentry” (that is, CAP) but doing so it makes it fairly easy to set up most things, from standing orders to transfers and changes of address. Changing address to my new apartment was quite straightforward, and it all seemed good. The mobile app on the other hand was less useful at first. The main problem is that the app will refuse to do much for the first ten days, because they “set it up” for you. I assume this is a security feature to avoid someone to get access to your account and have the app execute the transactions instead of the website. Unfortunately it also means that the app is useless if your phone dies and you need to get a new one.

Speaking of the mobile app, Barclays supports Apple Pay, but they don’t support Android Pay, probably because they don’t have to. On Android, you can have a replacement app to provide NFC payment support, and so they decided to use their banking app for the payments as well. Unfortunately the one time I tried using it, it kept throwing errors, and asked me to login, with network connection. I don’t think I’ll use this again and will rather look for a bank that supports Android Pay in the future.

Up to here everything sounds peachy, right? The card arrived, it worked, although I only used it a handful times, to buy stuff at IKEA and to buy plane tickets where Revolut would push an extra £5 due to it running on the credit card circuit1, rather than the debit card one.

Then the time came for me to buy a new computer, because of the one ““lost”” by the movers. Since Black Friday was around the corner, and with it my trip to Italy, I decided to wait for that and see if anything at all would come discounted. And indeed Crucial (Micron) had a discount on their SSDs, which is what I ended up ordering. Unfortunately, my first try to order ended up facing a Verified by Visa screen that, instead of trying to get more authentication factors for myself, just went on to tell me the transaction failed, and to check my phone for messages.

Indeed, my phone received two text messages: one telling me that a text message would be sent to confirm a transaction, and one asking me whether the transaction was intentional or not. After confirming it was me doing the transaction, I was responded to try the transaction again in a few minutes. Which I did, but even if this went through the Verified by Visa screen, PayPal refused the payment altogether. Trying to order directly through Crucial without using PayPal managed to get my order through… except it was cancelled half an hour later because Crucial could not confirm the details of the card.

At this point I tried topping up my Revolut account with the same card, and… it didn’t go well either. I tried calling them then, and they could only tell me that the problem was not theirs, and that they couldn’t even see the requests from Revolut, and they didn’t stop any other transactions, giving the fault to the vendor. The vendor of course blamed the bank, and so I got stuck in between.

Upon suggestion from Revolut on Twitter, I tried topping up by UK bank transfer. At first I got some silly “security questions” about the transfer (“Are you making this transfer to buy some goods? Is someone on the phone instructing you to make this payment?” and so on), but when it supposedly completed, I couldn’t see it in the list of transactions, and trying again would lead to a “technical problem” message. Calling the bank again has been even more frustrating because the call dropped once, and as usual the IVR asked me three times for my date of birth and never managed to recognize it. It wasn’t until I left the office, angry and disappointed, that the SMS arrived telling me to confirm if it was really me requesting the transfer…

The end result looked like Barclays put a stricter risk engine in place for Black Friday which has been causing my payments to not go through, particularly not from the office. Trying later in the evening from my apartment (which has a much more clear UK-based geolocation) allowed the orders to go through. You could say that this is for my own protection but I do find this particularly bothersome for one reason in particular: they have an app!

They could have just as easily sent a push notification to my phone to confirm or refuse the transaction, instead of requiring me to be able to receive text messages (which is not a given, as coverage is not perfect particularly in a city like London), in addition to me knowing my access code, having my bank card with me, and knowing its PIN.

At the end of the day I decided that Barclays is not the bank for me, and applied to open an account with Fineco which is Italian and appears to have Italian expats in the UK as their target market. Will keep you posted about it.

  1. But I found out just the other day that the new virtual cards from Revolut are actually VISA Electron, rather than MasterCard. This makes a difference for many airlines as VISA Electron are often considered debit cards, due to the “Electronic Use Only” limitation. I got myself a second virtual card for that and will see how that goes next time I book a flight.
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