Unpacking Google’s Web Environment Integrity specification

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

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?

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.

> 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.

>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.

> 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/