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I figured I’d take a minute to try and find the proposal itself, so I could see what the proponents considered the virtues of this to be.
https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/852
https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...
I stopped reading after the explainer’s intro section. The first example is making it easier for websites to sell adds (lmao) and the other 3 are extremely questionable whether if the proposed remedy even helps. And it’s presented as a benevolent alternative to browser fingerprinting, as if we must choose between these two awful choices. It’s an absolute joke of a proposal.
Gemini is a joke. The main proponents like Drew Devault chuck a tantrum when browsers allow users to optionally show favicons https://github.com/makew0rld/amfora/issues/199
> How many users have devices that they are really administrators of? Fewer and fewer.
As long as nobody has forced you to join your computer to a domain and accept the installation of group-policy overrides, you're still fundamentally an administrator of that machine.
You might not ever feel the need to administrate it, because the OS vendor is often co-administering the machine (see: Windows or macOS when you use a local account rooted in their cloud SSO) but the OS vendor hasn't restricted you from doing your own administration in the way that a corporation or institution administering the domain your device belongs to would restrict you. You still have the ambient authority to administer your machine, whether you ever bother to elevate yourself or not.
You can still install your own X.509 roots of trust. Even on, say, iOS! (You must administer the iOS device using tools — e.g. https://github.com/ProfileCreator/ProfileCreator — that run outside of the device on a "real computer"; but that's just a fact of history, to do with how system administrators generally prefer to interact with computers, not a property of the target device's security. A config profile is just a file format; if someone ever wanted to make a profile editor that ran on iOS itself, they could.)
(And if we're talking about a machine that is corporate or institutionally controlled? Well, then it's the responsibility of the people who manage your device — your IT department — to decide whether a given cert should be given trust.)
> What is the technical challenge of setting up your own HTTP server that can be browsed with an off the shelf browser on your local computer?
The approach where you run a proxy that wraps untrusted connections into trusted ones is fully general, but yes, only really applicable to the most advanced users. But then, only the most advanced users really need the full power of this approach. Only someone with a lot of experience in network security should consider themselves capable of vouchsafing a non-TLS HTTP connection as worth being trusted. You have to basically come up with an "attestation heuristic" for the remote yourself — that it stays on the same IP, that its DNS records haven't changed owner, that the server is still sending the same Server response header, etc.
If your needs are slightly weaker — if you can assume that every remote is at least using self-signed TLS certs rather than not using TLS at all — then the problem is vastly simplified: you can directly trust any cert by putting it that cert directly into your X.509 trust store (in effect making it a root-of-trust — though it doesn't have the X.509 property that enables other certs signed by the cert to be trusted transitively, so it's a leaf-node root-of-trust. A "stump of trust", if you will.) You don't need to run any local servers to do this.