Absolutely. My bank does not allow many operations via web browser anymore. It directs me to use the mobile apps. "Fraud prevention". All banks in my country are like that.
They only allow internet banking on a personal computer if you install their "security module". It's a kernel module that makes the computer incredibly slow. Once upon a time I tried to reverse engineer that thing to figure out why and I caught it intercepting every single network connection. That told me all I needed to know.
They want to own our computers. They think it's justified. As if "fraud" excuses everything. There is no limit they wouldn't cross. It's about control. They want to have all the control while we have zero.
In theory, pKVM could encapsulate a web browser with spyware kernel module into a dedicated VM that cannot see other traffic. The bank could "own" the banking client VM, while the device owner could run other VMs of their choice.
This merely isolates the problem. It still means we don't fully own our machines.
These virtual machines you speak of would be running on our machines but configured so that we actually have zero access to them. Do we really own the machines if we can't see the code they're running? If we can't view or edit the memory?
Those virtual machines are little foreign embassies on our machines that lets them claim sovereignty over our computing resources. It's our land but their territory and laws. Our computers, processors and memory but their code and data. They carve out little niches out of our own hardware that even we cannot access.
Stuff like this cannot happen without them usurping some amount of power from us. And they will probably usurp far more than they need to. Because they can.
Absolutely. My bank does not allow many operations via web browser anymore. It directs me to use the mobile apps. "Fraud prevention". All banks in my country are like that.
They only allow internet banking on a personal computer if you install their "security module". It's a kernel module that makes the computer incredibly slow. Once upon a time I tried to reverse engineer that thing to figure out why and I caught it intercepting every single network connection. That told me all I needed to know.
They want to own our computers. They think it's justified. As if "fraud" excuses everything. There is no limit they wouldn't cross. It's about control. They want to have all the control while we have zero.