Google's Latest Browser Security Concept Sparks Concerns Of Internet Restriction

Google has proposed a new way to figure out whether browsers can be trusted. The proposal, dubbed Web Environment Integrity (WEI) appeared as code in April has was announced later in May.

It was published as a working draft specification on Friday and has registered some strong responses since then. According to Google engineers, WEI is a way for browser clients to establish trust with a server through a third party (for example, Google Play) that generates a token that is then able to "attest to the integrity of the client environment," The Register reported.

Essentially, WEI is a way for browsers to figure out if it is is operating as expected without any manipulations. Websites can deploy WEI to get rid of bots or fake players during a game.

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WEI generates criticism

While this sounds noble in practice, many are worried about its impact on the internet. If mandated, WEI would ensure that authorised and official browsers would be accepted by websites.

"The Web Environment Integrity API allows user agents to request attester verdicts from an attester that can be used to verify the integrity of the web environment," the draft explains. "These verdicts are piped to a relying party where they are validated for authenticity. Web Environment Integrity is best suited for detecting deceptive web environments."

What is the purpose? According to the document, WEI will help get rid of social media manipulation, bots, misuse of WebViews within apps, bulk web hijacking, cheating in web-based games, password-guessing attempts, and more.

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Even then, the authors of the document say that WEI will become a "robust and long-term sustainable anti-abuse solution." Exciting, right? However, the internet still has no standard understanding of the word abuse, so it's unclear what will be allowed.

Mozilla's head of web platform, Brian Grinstead opposed the proposal in a post on Monday. "Detecting fraud and invalid traffic is a challenging problem that we're interested in helping address. However this proposal does not explain how it will make practical progress on the listed use cases, and there are clear downsides to adopting it," he wrote.

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Alex Russell, partner product manager, Microsoft Edge took to Mastodon to urge people to withhold their judgment until WEI is more fully developed. "Particularly in the early design phase, lots of ideas are bad! And that's OK! API design requires a journey through a problem space, and the best way to redirect this sort of thing isn't to extrapolate to worst-case scenarios, it's to ask that folks show their work and demonstrate value."

Chris Palmer, a former Google engineer who now works at Tailscale, also called the proposal a bad idea on Mastodon. "If you make your customer your enemy, you have profoundly screwed the pooch. A framework for enabling publishers to make their customers their enemies is a framework for profoundly screwing the pooch."

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