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Google Chrome's Web Environment Integrity feature has been cancelled (9to5google.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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While WEI is thankfully cancelled, it's not entirely cancelled... They're planning on making it available still in WebViews with the intention that websites can check if a malicious Android app is trying to do a phishing scheme.

Seems like such a niche "security" feature... what are they really trying to accomplish here? Something seems fishy to me

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

We gotta remain vigilant.

Agreed, but I disagree about the first part. It being only available in webviews can't really be abused and makes all the difference. Sure they could try to reintroduce all the bad stuff, even if the had cancelled it altogether, but for now this is a success.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You're completely wrong.

This means that they will implement it, and then it's only a tiny change to make it available everywhere if they decide to do so later.

The option alone also now also allows people to build stuff that will only work in those WebViews, rejecting to work without the integrity check, which is already a huge loss.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The option alone also now also allows people to build stuff that will only work in those WebViews, rejecting to work without the integrity check, which is already a huge loss.

Can you give a concrete example how this would be a huge issue? A webview is part of an app, which is already a closed system. If a developer wants to, they can already build their app using native UI with integrity checks. Now they can do the same when using webviews. It really has none of the implications it would have for browsers.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

He means this builds all the backend and proof of concepts necessary to force it on every other environment, and websites will be prepared for the switch, giving the public that much less time to react when they push it to desktop again

It’s basically “OK, we can’t stop the pushback, so we’ll tell the public it will only work on android web view, but all teams keep working full steam, we’ll wait to merge into the bigger systems until all this dies down, and we won’t have lost any dev time!”

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's what he wrote in his second paragraph and it's a fair point. In his third paragraph (the one I quoted) he claims that just having that functionality in webviews is already a "huge loss" though and I was curious what kind of scenario he was thinking of.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You don’t think having to go through all this to stop it again next time, but it’s even harder because it can now be implemented orders of magnitude faster than before, counts as a “huge loss”?