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Dan Goodin, Ars Technica
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In late 2019, the New South Wales government in Australia implemented virtual driver’s licenses. The new licenses allowed other people to use their iPhone or Android device to provide evidence of identity and age at traffic police stops or in bars, shops, hotels and other places. ServiceNSW, as the government company is commonly known, promised that it would “provide greater degrees of security and coverage against identity fraud, compared to the plastic driver’s license” that citizens had had for decades.
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Now, 30 months later, security researchers have shown that it is trivial for anyone to forge virtual driver’s licenses or DDLs with false identities. This strategy allows other underage drinkers to replace their date of birth and scammers to spoof false identities. The procedure takes much less than an hour, requires no special hardware or expensive software, and will generate fake IDs that will pass inspection through the electronic verification formula used by police and engagement sites. All this, despite assurances that safety was a key priority for the newly created DDL formula.
“To be clear, we believe that if the virtual driver’s license were advanced by implementing a more secure design, then the above done on behalf of ServiceNSW would be true, and we agree that the virtual driver’s license would provide greater degrees of security. opposed to fraud compared to plastic driver’s license,” Noah Farmer, the investigator who knew about the flaws, wrote in an article published last week.
“When an unsuspecting victim scans the scammer’s QR code, everything will be verified and the victim will know that the scammer has combined their own ID photo with the details of someone’s stolen driver’s license,” he continued. However, as it stands over the past 30 months, DDLs allow “malicious users to generate [a] fraudulent virtual driver’s license with minimal effort on jailbroken and non-jailbroken devices without the need to modify or repackage the mobile app itself.
DDLs require an iOS or Android app that presents the person’s credentials. The same app allows police and sites to determine that credentials are authentic. Features designed to verify that the ID is authentic and up-to-date include:
The strategy to triumph over those promises is strangely simple. The key is the ability to brutally force the PIN that encrypts the data. Since it has only 4 digits, there are only 10,000 combinations imaginable. Using publicly available scripts and a basic computer, someone can be informed of the right combination in minutes, as shown in this video by popping up the procedure on an iPhone.
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Once a scammer has knowledge of someone’s encrypted DDL license, either with permission, by stealing a copy stored in an iPhone backup, or by remote compromise, brute force gives them the ability to read and modify all the knowledge stored in the file.
From there, it’s all about undeniable brute force software and popular smartphone and PC purposes to extract the registry that stores the credentials, decrypt it, edit the text, re-encrypt it, and copy it to the device. The exact steps on an iPhone are:
With this, the ServiceNSW application will demonstrate the identification and provide it as genuine.
The following video shows the total procedure from the beginning to the end.
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A variety of design flaws make this trick possible.
The first is the lack of good enough encryption. Sadly, a key based on a four-digit PIN is bad enough. Apple provides a service called SecRandomCopyBytes to produce random bytes that can be used to generate secure keys. Digit PIN, would make the brute force task much more difficult, if not absolutely unlikely for attackers,” Farmer wrote.
The next main flaw is that, surprisingly, DDL knowledge is never validated unlike the main knowledge base to make sure that what is stored on the iPhone matches the records kept by the ministry. Without any way to validate knowledge natively, there is no way to know when data has been falsified. As a result, attackers must see the counterfeit knowledge in the NSW Service application without any way to save it or stumble upon fraud.
The third shortcoming is that the use of the “pull-to-refresh” function (a cornerstone of the DDL verification scheme so that maximum recent data is displayed) does not allow the knowledge stored in the electronic CR to be updated. , only updates the QR code. A better response would be for the Upgrade Extraction Service to download the latest copy of the DDL from the ServiceNSW database.
Fourth, the QR code only conveys the name and prestige of the DDL holder, over or under the age of 18. The QR code is intended to allow the identity verifier to scan it with their own ServiceNSW app to validate that the knowledge presented is genuine. To circumvent verification, a scammer only has to get the driver’s license main points from a stolen or otherwise received DDL and update it locally on their phone.
“When an unsuspecting victim scans the scammer’s QR code, everything will be verified and the victim may not know that the scammer has combined their own ID photo with the details of someone’s stolen driver’s license,” Farmer explained. If the formula had thrown up the valid data symbol, the scanning party would have noticed smoothly that the scammer had tampered with the DDL, as the face returned through the NSW service did not fit with the face displayed in the app.
The last defect known to the researcher is that the application backs up and restores the data it stores. While all files stored in the Documents and Library/Application Support/ folders are subsidized by default, iOS developers seamlessly exclude certain files from the backup by calling NSURL setResourceValue:forKey:error: with the key NSURLIsExcludedFromBackupKey.
With four million NSW citizens informed of DDL, the error can have serious consequences for anyone who relies on DDL to determine identities, ages, addresses or other non-public information. It’s unclear how, or even if Service NSW plans to respond. Given the time differences between San Francisco and New South Wales, branch officials were not immediately available for comment.
Farmer pointed to the tweet, which called a hotel bar for denying service to someone who only had a physical ID and instead only accepted DDL. “I know 10 kids that you let in with fake virtual licenses because they’re easy to do,” the user said. .
While the veracity of this claim cannot be verified, it is plausible given the ease and effectiveness of the trick shown here.
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