Unpacking Google’s Web Environment Integrity specification

Very controversial take but I think this benefits the vast majority of users by allowing them to bypass captchas. I’m assuming that people would use this API to avoid showing real users captchas, not completely prevent them from browsing the web.

Unfortunately people who have rooted phones, who use nonstandard browsers are not more than 1% of users. It’s important that they exist, but the web is a massive platform. We can not let a tyranny of 1% of users steer the ship. The vast majority of users would benefit from this, if it really works.

However i could see that this tool would be abused by certain websites and prevent users from logging in if on a non standard browser, especially banks. Unfortunate but overall beneficial to the masses.

Edit: Apparently 5% of the time it intentionally omits the result so it can’t be used to block clients. Very reasonable solution.

> I think this benefits the vast majority of users by allowing them to bypass captchas.

I don't think it does that. Nothing about this reduces the problem that captchas are attempting to solve.

> i could see that this tool would be abused by certain websites and prevent users from logging in if on a non standard browser, especially banks.

That's not abusing this tool. That's the very thing that this is intended to allow.

The explicit goals are thus:

* Allow web servers to evaluate the authenticity of the device and honest representation of the software stack and the traffic from the device.

* Offer an adversarially robust and long-term sustainable anti-abuse solution.

* Don't enable new cross-site user tracking capabilities through attestation. Continue to allow web browsers to browse the Web without attestation.

From: https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...

If it actually won't do any of those things, then that should be debated first.

Captchas are intended to stop bots. WEI is intended to vet that the hardware and browser has been validated. That doesn't impact bots, because you can implement bots on top of a valid hardware and browser so it will pass the WEI check.