How open are Vivokey products?

[amal]

To be clear, the devices we’re talking about are not yet publicly available… but they are coming. They will be smart card contactless secure elements, and you will be able to write and deploy your own java card applets to them… so they are “open” to whatever software applet you want to deploy (for the most part)… however if you want total autonomy, then that will rely on a key reset option of some sort.

@fraggersparks

There is no factory reset command on the current chip. The main consumers of these chips, banks and national ID schemes, don’t need it. For Fidesmo to unlock it, they’d need to send a command to set the default key on the chip, using their keys as the authentication.

Everyone has done a pretty bang-up job explaining things so I don’t have much left to say about it… but this is the key issue. Even if Fidesmo goes out of business, the company officers would still be legally liable to make provisions for key reset… either through a reset process or through a simple disclosure of current keys. If VivoKey goes out of business then customers could still go direct to Fidesmo and issue a key request or request some sort of reset option.

However, corporate apocalypse is not the intended trigger here… we do plan to make this option available as soon as possible to every customer.

Now, to be clear, this does not apply to the Spark products because the Spark products have no such key system and are simply locked. You can still use them with UID based applications and 3rd party devices, but the keys are set and locked, as is the content on the Spark 1… the Spark 2 will have an option to unlock the user memory in the future.