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Unpacking Google’s Web Environment Integrity specification

(vivaldi.com)
756 points dagurp | 11 comments | 26 Jul 23 11:30 UTC | HN request time: 0.025s | source | bottom
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endisneigh ◴[26 Jul 23 17:54 UTC] No.36881965[source]▶
How exactly is WEI any worse than say a peep-hole on a door? At the end of the day bots are a huge problem and it's only getting worse. What's the alternative solution? You need to know who you're dealing with, both in life and clearly on the web.

I'm probably alone in this, but WEI is a good thing. Anyone who's run a site knows the headache around bots. Sites that don't care about bots can simply not use WEI. Of course, we know they will use it, because bots are a headache. Millions of engineer hours are wasted yearly on bot nonsense.

With the improvements in AI this was inevitable anyway. Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional. Reap what you sow and what not.

edit: removing ssl comparison since it's not really my point to begin with

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klabb3 ◴[26 Jul 23 18:08 UTC] No.36882221[source]▶
SSL is in practice only used for server certificates. It was kinda shit and a lot of people complained because of CAs but then we got let’s encrypt etc which alleviated the situation. And the identity is only tied to domain control, unlike eg code signing certs which are orders of magnitude more invasive and frankly a racket.

In either case, WEI has the potential to be proper DRM, like in the “approved devices” fashion. It’s deeply invasive, and can be used to exclude any type of usage at the whim of mega corps, like screen readers, ad blocking, anti-tracking/fingerprinting, downloading copyrighted content, and anything new they can think of in the future. It’s quite literally the gateway to making the web an App Store (or at best, multiple app stores).

> What's the alternative solution?

To what problem? Bots specifically or humans who want to use the web in any way they want?

If bots, then elaborate. Many bots are good, and ironically the vast majority of bot traffic comes from the very corporations that are behind this stuff. As for the really bad bots, we have IP blocklisting. For the gray/manipulative bots, sure, that’s a problem. What makes you think that problem needs to be addressed with mandatory handcuffs for everyone else?

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endisneigh ◴[26 Jul 23 18:13 UTC] No.36882293[source]▶
Why should sites be obligated to let anyone in? Do you let anyone into your house? I'm surprised WEI wasn't implemented long ago.

This notion of destroying the open web is so nonsensical. WEI is not obligatory. If it's being implemented it's because it solves a real problem. Think about it. There will still be sites that don't use it.

People's real issue is that the big sites will use WEI because the problem it solves is legitimate but they don't want to identify themselves, which makes sense, but they were never obligated to let you visit their site to begin with.

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1. baby_souffle ◴[26 Jul 23 18:27 UTC] No.36882543[source]▶
> Why should sites be obligated to let anyone in?

They're not. Depending on your competency, you have a _ton_ of tools at your disposal for filtering traffic ranging from basic throttle to sophisticated behavior/request profiling.

I've spent more than a little bit of my career dealing with bots and I'm not really sure that a cryptographically signed blob proving that the request came from $thisSpecificVersion of firefox running on $thisExactVersion of osx is really going to help me.

I don't care _what_ made the request because that can always be spoofed; this cat and mouse game always ends at the analog loop hole. I care about what the request(s) are trying to do and that is something that I figure out with just the data I have server side.

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2. treis ◴[26 Jul 23 18:43 UTC] No.36882806[source]▶
>I've spent more than a little bit of my career dealing with bots and I'm not really sure that a cryptographically signed blob proving that the request came from $thisSpecificVersion of firefox running on $thisExactVersion of osx is really going to help me.

It'll end DDOS by botnet. Compromised computers would (presumably) have to run a full browser. That's much more computationally expensive and (presumably) the user would see it running.

And the flaw here is that the proposal doesn't do enough. If that signed blob allowed you to uniquely ID the device it would help solve a lot more problems. That would end DDOS for the most part and make managing abuse a lot easier.

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3. baby_souffle ◴[26 Jul 23 19:19 UTC] No.36883396[source]▶
> And the flaw here is that the proposal doesn't do enough. If that signed blob allowed you to uniquely ID the device it would help solve a lot more problems.

This is more or less what the proposal does? It's akin to the same shady stuff seen here [1] except this time some third party gets to sign it.

> That would end DDOS for the most part and make managing abuse a lot easier.

Not every bot that I'm defending against is a DDoS but I can probably figure out a way to overwhelm the "pre-content" filter that's trying to figure out if a token is legit or not.

[1] - https://fingerprint.com/demo/

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4. Urd- ◴[26 Jul 23 19:41 UTC] No.36883723[source]▶
>It'll end DDOS by botnet.

Not even remotely. This proposal is adding this attestation to one of the last network layers, most DDOS methods won't be touched by this.

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5. doxick ◴[26 Jul 23 19:47 UTC] No.36883815[source]▶
It ends DDOS's as much as putting basic-auth in front of it. If that were the case: SSL should already prevent it as well.
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6. treis ◴[26 Jul 23 20:03 UTC] No.36884093{3}[source]▶
>Not every bot that I'm defending against is a DDoS but I can probably figure out a way to overwhelm the "pre-content" filter that's trying to figure out if a token is legit or not.

That's true of every DDOS filter. It doesn't mean that having a cryptographically secure way to make requests more expensive to produce isn't a tremendous help.

>This is more or less what the proposal does? It's akin to the same shady stuff seen here [1] except this time some third party gets to sign it.

The fingerprint isn't unique to the extent that you can rely on it always correctly identifying a single user. So you can't ban based on the fingerprint or automatically log someone in.

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7. Urd- ◴[26 Jul 23 20:13 UTC] No.36884261{3}[source]▶
Even less so since this is a proposal for a javascript api.
8. baby_souffle ◴[26 Jul 23 20:38 UTC] No.36884633{4}[source]▶
> It doesn't mean that having a cryptographically secure way to make requests more expensive to produce isn't a tremendous help.

A malicious actor wouldn't bother. They'll tap `/dev/random` when it comes time to send the blessed token to the origin. The onus is going to be on the origin to figure out that it's _not_ a valid/signed token. If it's as easy for the origin to do this as it is for the adversary to tap a RNG then what was the point? If it's harder for the origin to figure out my token isn't legit than it was for me to generate one, how is the origin better off?

In any case, you're filtering the DDOS out *after* you've managed to set up the TCP/TLS/HTTP connection. That seems to be a rather late/expensive point to do so!

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9. lossolo ◴[26 Jul 23 21:44 UTC] No.36885526{3}[source]▶
It will help a lot of services like Cloudflare, basically stopping most of spamming/ddos on sites behind it. Big cloud vendors will probably implement similar solutions in which you will be able to only allow attested traffic to your site.
10. treis ◴[27 Jul 23 13:02 UTC] No.36892780{5}[source]▶
>If it's as easy for the origin to do this as it is for the adversary to tap a RNG then what was the point? If it's harder for the origin to figure out my token isn't legit than it was for me to generate one, how is the origin better off?

Because it's less computational intense than serving responses and/or trying to fingerprint malicious actors. It also tells you with near certainty that the request is malicious and future requests from that IP can be blocked.

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11. baby_souffle ◴[27 Jul 23 16:47 UTC] No.36896365{6}[source]▶
> It also tells you with near certainty that the request is malicious and future requests from that IP can be blocked.

So I can still use this to DDOS. My malware running somewhere on your network just needs to submit a bogus request from your IP address. Origin sees the bogus requests from your IP and now that IP is on the bad list. Later - your legit requests from the same IP are ... denied.

I don't know that an "inverse" DDOS is novel, but it's certainly not been common. Perhaps that may change in the future...