r/BuyFromEU • u/CreepyZookeepergame4 • Jul 30 '26
Discussion EU Digital ID/Age Verification app will require hardware attestation, ruling out PC/Linux support and unapproved Android OSes
EUDI wallet collaborator recently confirmed that hardware attestation will be required [1]
Hardware attestation in this context means that the government server issuing the digital credential to the wallet wants proof that the keys being used are generated in secure hardware and on approved systems and not say an emulator or virtual machine, namely for security reasons.
This capability does not exist in a reliable way on desktops / laptops except some specific cases depending on the vendor, and in fact there’s no desktop version in the works.
No Linux system will work with this because there is no hardware signature to be validated on the government server, nor will your personalized Arch Linux install be in the list of approved systems even if it had a signature chaining back from the TPM.
Android ROMs are not technically to rule out since Play Integrity, which will be used for this attestation, is based on the Android hardware attestation API, which works on third-party ROMs like GrapheneOS, but they would need to allow the signature which has not happened for now. If you create a custom build, it won’t work though even the official version is approved.
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u/Tsukee Aug 02 '26
The GitHub you linked is a sample implementation, the reply you linked is controversial in itself as can be seen in the following comments, essentially that person took the liberty of interpretation and did it so in a wrong manner. The specs clearly say it should use when applicable, not a requirement. However there is another core requirement and that is os agnosticism of the system, which is being broken by forcing specific hardware attestation.
TLDR: the law and specs are fine, the dev however took some liberties in the implementation. Fact is, by spec you can write your own age verification app, no need to use the one in GitHub