Posts Tagged "Chromium"

A new API proposal being prototyped within Chromium, and the brainchild of a team comprised solely of Google engineers, has become a topic of heated conversation recently - Web Environment Integrity. This proposal has actually been public on GitHub from as far back as late April, however has gained the attention (and ire) of much of the larger developer community and users alike due to its highly polarising end goal and far-reaching implications if implemented across web services and devices.

What does Web Environment Integrity seek to achieve? I’ll let Google’s Ben Wiser (@RupertBenWiser), one of the creators of the proposal, explain it for me.

[WEI seeks to] allow web servers to evaluate the authenticity of the device and honest representation of the software stack and the traffic from the device.
– Ben Wiser, “WEI Explainer”

Essentially, WEI is yet another trusted computing technology. It aims to allow websites to verify the platform and environment of the browser using cryptographically signed “attestations”, provided by a limited set of “attesters” which through some mechanism determine the level of trust for the user’s platform. We’ve seen similar concepts to this introduced into many areas of software in recent years, the most notable of which that comes to mind being Windows 11’s hard requirement of a TPM, and they are, across the board, incredibly controversial.