Use-cases Alternatives

use-cases reviews and mentions

• Google Chrome Proposal – Web Environment Integrity
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Jul 2023

  These proposals appear to be coming from the W3C Anti-Fraud Community Group. They haven't identified even a single use case[1] of the technologies they're trying to push onto the world being misused and abused. Use cases and their naivety appear to be largely copied from the OWASP Automated Threats to Web Applications[2].

  There are no use case about these technologies being used by a dystopian country. No use case about enabling anti-competitive practices from incumbent companies. Seemingly little to no care or attempts to balance the longer term strategic impacts of these technologies on society, such as loss of innovation or greater fragility due to increased centralisation/monopolisation of technology. No cost-benefit analysis or historical analysis for identified threat actors likelihood to compromise TPMs and attested operating systems to avoid these technologies (there's no shortage of Widevine L1 content out there on the Internet). No environmental impact consideration for blacklisting devices and having them all thrown into a rubbish tip too early in their lifespan. No political/sovereignty consideration to whether people around the world will accept a handful of American technology companies to be in control of everything, and whether that would push to the rest of the world to abandon American technology.

  The majority of the contributors to these projects appear to be tech employees of large technology companies seemingly without experience outside of this bubble. Discussions within the group at times self-identify this naivety. The group appears very hasty to propose the most drastic, impractical technical security controls with significant negative impacts such as whitelisting device hardware and software. But in the real world for e.g. banking fraud, attacks typically occur through social engineering where the group's proposed technical controls wouldn't help. There appears to be little to no attempt made to consider more effective real world security controls with fewer negative impacts, such as delaying transactions and notifying users through multiple channels to ensure users have had a chance to validate a transaction or "cool off".

  [1] https://github.com/antifraudcg/use-cases/blob/main/USE-CASES...

  [2] https://owasp.org/www-project-automated-threats-to-web-appli...