Google’s nightmare “Web Integrity API” wants a DRM gatekeeper for the web

Google's newest proposed web standard is... DRM? Over the weekend the Internet got wind of this proposal for a "Web Environment Integrity API. " The explainer is authored by four Googlers, including at least one person on Chrome's "Privacy Sandbox" team, which is responding to the death of tracking cookies by building a user-tracking ad platform right into the browser.

The intro to the Web Integrity API starts out: "Users often depend on websites trusting the client environment they run in. This trust may assume that the client environment is honest about certain aspects of itself, keeps user data and intellectual property secure, and is transparent about whether or not a human is using it."

The goal of the project is to learn more about the person on the other side of the web browser, ensuring they aren't a robot and that the browser hasn't been modified or tampered with in any unapproved ways. The intro says this data would be useful to advertisers to better count ad impressions, stop social network bots, enforce intellectual property rights, stop cheating in web games, and help financial transactions be more secure.

Perhaps the most telling line of the explainer is that it "takes inspiration from existing native attestation signals such as [Apple's] App Attest and the [Android] Play Integrity API." Play Integrity (formerly called "SafetyNet") is an Android API that lets apps find out if your device has been rooted. Root access allows you full control over the device that you purchased, and a lot of app developers don't like that. So if you root an Android phone and get flagged by the Android Integrity API, several types of apps will just refuse to run. You'll generally be locked out of banking apps, Google Wallet, online games, Snapchat, and some media apps like Netflix. You could be using root access to cheat at games or phish banking data, but you could also just want root to customize your device, remove crapware, or have a viable backup system. Play Integrity doesn't care and will lock you out of those apps either way. Google wants the same thing for the web.

Google's plan is that, during a webpage transaction, the web server could require you to pass an "environment attestation" test before you get any data. At this point your browser would contact a "third-party" attestation server, and you would need to pass some kind of test. If you passed, you would get a signed "IntegrityToken" that verifies your environment is unmodified and points to the content you wanted unlocked. You bring this back to the web server, and if the server trusts the attestation company, you get the content unlocked and finally get a response with the data you wanted.