Page 26 - ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services – Technology, innovation and competition

ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services
Technology, Innovation and Competition

Authentication

Poor or non-existent user authentication is a major risk in mobile devices. Users should be encouraged to
enable device authentication, including device PINs, gesture locks, and/or biometric authentication, and
carriers should provide devices that include these features (this is especially important for feature phones).

Non-repudiation

Without adequate logging mechanisms, including capturing the provenance of user actions or logging of critical
actions into tamper-proof storage, it can be difficult to audit systems after the fact to establish culpability of
actions. Without the use of digital signatures attached to actions, particularly those that arrive over a network
connection, non-repudiation is not possible.

Data confidentiality

Applications are often reliant on security libraries offered by the operating system – this is the preferred practice
to applications designing their own cryptography. Hence, it becomes particularly important to ensure that
these libraries are correctly designed and implemented and that the cipher suites they support are sufficiently
strong. The Heartbleed bug [5] was an example of a large-scale reliance on a security library that had been
found to contain a long-lived security vulnerability, potentially compromising confidentiality of tens of millions
of devices including smartphones.

Communication security
Support for encryption across network connections may be provided through libraries within the operating
system. It is critical to ensure that such libraries remain updated to prevent attacks against encryption ciphers
that can compromise confidentiality. Such attacks such as Heartbleed and POODLE have already been seen
in commodity operating systems.

Data integrity
Similar to issues with communication security, it is vital that cryptographic libraries be updated in response to
attacks against underlying cryptosystems and that applications are linked to these updated libraries, in order
to support data integrity.

Availability

A major concern for mobile operating systems is the threat of malware or other offensive code that can be
wielded by an attacker, as well as insufficient protection against malformed input. Such malicious input can
potentially lead to buffer overflows or other exploits in the operating system, which can cause applications
and other services to crash, denying access for the DFS app to contact the external network.

Privacy
User privacy can be compromised by attacks such as phishing, which is often the first activity in advance of an
advanced persistent threat (APT) that can lead to larger scale compromise. Attacks against operating systems
have been numerous and virulent, from malware and privacy-compromising advertising to ransomware and
targeted zero-day attacks.

Recommendations for mitigation
R6 – Regular security updates are critical to ensure that mobile operating systems running on user devices
operate using the latest security patches. This is a means of protecting users against recently developed

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