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An experimental Android WebView Media Integrity API early next year

android-developers.googleblog.com

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Re: An experimental Android WebView Media Integrity API early next year

#171

Post by londons_explore »

IshKebab wrote: post #136
andybak wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Webviews are particularly vulnerable though, being used for embedded logins for sometimes dubious 3rd party apps. Is there a reasonable angle to view this from? I personally don't think embedded webviews should be allowed general browsing capability unless they are part of a standalone browser. It's usually a trick to capture traffic that would otherwise go off to the open web.

> being used for embedded logins for sometimes dubious 3rd party apps. That's a difficult problem to solve though. To do it properly you'd need something like Windows' secure key sequence (ctrl-alt-del) which apps can't intercept. Otherwise there's no way that a user can know that what they're seeing is the system rather than a malicious app. Consider that any app can embed any browser or UI that they want.

That exists on mobile though... They could easily have a "swipe down to login" gesture, where you would see some system UI saying "Appname wants your password to foo.com, do you want to allow the app to log in using your saved password?".

foo.com could also cooperate and allow the message to say:

"Appname wants to 'send pokes' on foo.com, do you want to allow this?" - allowing the app a scoped login to only specific actions.

Re: An experimental Android WebView Media Integrity API early next year

#172

Post by londons_explore »

andybak wrote: post #69
TremendousJudge wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's the problem you're trying to solve, disallow embedded ~~logins~~ webviews and do it through a proper browser, same as on a regular computer. The other way seems overkill and smells like foul play to me.

I'm not sure how you disallow embedded login without disallowing embedded webviews. The line is very blurry.

You have two types of webviews... "Webviews to the appmakers server", and "Webviews for the wider web".

Webviews to the appmakers server need to be authorized by some manifest file on the server whitelisting the app identifier.

Webviews for the wider web don't allow the app to know what's going on inside the webview, nor interact with it. So these are safe to type passwords into etc.

Re: An experimental Android WebView Media Integrity API early next year

#173

Post by jasonjayr »

JohnFen wrote: post #164
c0pium wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if it drains people’s bank accounts because they aren’t savvy enough to know that their bank’s app is realbank not realbankofficial? Deal with it? The stance that other people should have their savings stolen, when we could have easily stopped it, because of nebulous freedom reasons is pretty ghoulish.

Perhaps the solution is to have two classes of machines, some "safe" for those who don't want to (or can't) be proactive and alert to security threats, and some "unsafe" for those who want total control over their machines and are willing to take on the security risks and responsibilities to do that.

I mean, yes. 1000% yes.

But the reality is that the 'market' will push to only make content for the "safe" machines, and the total control folks will slowly get locked out.

Banks have required auditors that will mandate only allowing access from 'safe' environments Media companies will do everything to make sure content is only played in 'safe' environments Government will allow allow you to interact with their technology from 'safe' environments, etc.

And they will all believe 100% they are doing the right thing to protect the users.

I am deeply afraid for open general purpose computing.

Re: An experimental Android WebView Media Integrity API early next year

#174

Post by wkat4242 »

phoronixrly wrote: post #148
wkat4242 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great. Really dodged a bullet there.

They are still making it easier for developers to create apps that limit what you can do with your own hardware.

Yeah I wish they would not have.

However, it does eliminate this issue for 90% of my usecases. The apps that will want to do this stuff I probably won't even want to use anyway.

Re: An experimental Android WebView Media Integrity API early next year

#175

Post by cesarb »

trinsic2 wrote: post #124
Analemma_ wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve complained about this before, but I’ve been hearing “Microsoft is going to block you from installing Linux!” since like 2004, when it was a reliable way to get an easy “+5 Insightful” on Slashdot. It hasn’t happened, even on Microsoft’s own first-party computers. At this point I think it’s firmly FUD and the people who say it’s coming any second now need to put up the evidence. Microsoft doesn’t seem to care, es…

If you keep track of the changes to the BIOS firmware, you can see the changes. Their minuscule but happening. We don't have full blow preventing from disabling secure boot yet, but it appears to me that's were this is going. (Disabling usb ports, having keys that prevent disabling Secure boot unless you clear them or change them. All it takes is some event to bring these companies over the edge. The Asus MB developm…

> > I’ve complained about this before, but I’ve been hearing “Microsoft is going to block you from installing Linux!” since like 2004 [...]

> If you keep track of the changes to the BIOS firmware, you can see the changes. Their minuscule but happening. We don't have full blow preventing from disabling secure boot yet, but it appears to me that's were this is going.

Case in point: until recently, even with SecureBoot enabled by default, you could boot Linux distributions which have their bootloader signed by Microsoft, without going into the firmware setup screen. Nowadays, at least with some Lenovo models, you have to go to the firmware setup screen, and either enable a cryptically named option or disable SecureBoot. A quick web search gave me https://www.omglinux.com/boot-linux-modern-lenovo-thinkpads-... which has a screenshot, and which mentions that this is a new Microsoft requirement (instead of something Lenovo came up with).

Re: An experimental Android WebView Media Integrity API early next year

#176

Post by wkat4242 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #159
wkat4242 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's other times where a party just screws up. e.g. Apple's CSAM Did Apple really screw up? Their proposal is pretty much what the EU and UK governments want now :( I think they screwed up because to have my own phone spying on me is unthinkable and I would never have considered another Apple product again. But politics seem to like the idea.

Those governments are mostly coming around as to why that’s a bad idea.

I don't think so, I think they're just regrouping to find another approach to push it through.

Re: An experimental Android WebView Media Integrity API early next year

#177

Post by Pannoniae »

skydhash wrote: post #150
imiric wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. More like the entity pointing the gun has now decocked it. The scary part is that there is a single entity with that kind of power to begin with. It's a testament of the failure of the modern web, and how far it has strayed from the original spirit of the internet.

Mostly because most people don’t care about the original spirit of the internet. As long as they can get their job done, consume entertainment, and play status game, they are content. Which is why for most people, their internet is just a handful of tech companies. It’s basically Minitel, but fueled by ads.

what's a "status game"?

Re: An experimental Android WebView Media Integrity API early next year

#178

Post by vetinari »

Analemma_ wrote: post #67
userbinator wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and it would banish Linux from all PCs making Windows the some possible OS We're getting closer to that with things like "secure" boot. Fortunately that can still be disabled, but MS even required that on ARM platforms it can't. The bigger Linux distros have bent over and gotten MS to sign their bootloaders, essentially making them at the mercy of MS.

I’ve complained about this before, but I’ve been hearing “Microsoft is going to block you from installing Linux!” since like 2004, when it was a reliable way to get an easy “+5 Insightful” on Slashdot. It hasn’t happened, even on Microsoft’s own first-party computers. At this point I think it’s firmly FUD and the people who say it’s coming any second now need to put up the evidence. Microsoft doesn’t seem to care, es…

It did happen - on Windows RT machines. Linux was locked out, only Microsoft-blessed binaries would load; not just efi, os-ones as well.

Fortunately, this one went nowhere. But the same concept could be repeated on x64.

Re: An experimental Android WebView Media Integrity API early next year

#179

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

c0pium wrote: post #162
josteink wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The benefit to the user is they can supposedly "trust" the content that is being shown in the webview is, in fact, owned by or affiliated somehow with the app. You got it backwards. The user gets to trust nothing. The “trust” in this case is for the server to asses if it a trusted (not hacked/hackable) environment to deploy content to. DRM is the only use case.

This is incorrect. If Chase uses attestation then only the Chase app can access their login site. It prevents DefinitelyChaseAndNotMalware from masquerading as Chase.

Well, no, at best it prevents DefinitelyChaseAndNotMalware from directly proxying Chase; it doesn't do anything to prevent someone... for the sake of argument, screenshotting the real Chase site and login flow, and serving that up to the user. It trades completely undermining user freedom and control for a minor increase in friction for bad actors.

Re: An experimental Android WebView Media Integrity API early next year

#180

Post by marklar423 »

josephg wrote: post #97
marklar423 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree, but how do you feel about you (the machine owner) also not having access to it? That's my major problem with it; it locks you out of messing with your own machine data, which you can see being instantly abused by third parties to prevent modifications.

TPM chips are pretty open. I had a look through the spec & API for tpm 2.0 a few years ago and there’s a lot of neat tricks you can do with them. TPM chips are an open standard with many implementations. As far as I can tell, as a software developer you have full access to the chip. The only thing you can’t do with them (by design) is read the signing keys or generate secure boot attestations for machines which didn’…

That's pretty interesting. I wonder if replacing the signing keys could help negate DRM-y uses of the TPM
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