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Comment by jmull | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't seem like there's much difference in the trust model between E2EE web apps and App Store apps. Either way the publisher controls the code and you essentially decide whether to trust the publisher or not.

Perhaps there's something here that affects that dynamic, but I don't know what it is. It would help this effort to point out what that is.

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On the web, if your server is compromised it's game over, even if the publisher is not malicious. In app stores, you have some guarantee that the code that ends up on your device is what the publisher intended to ship (basically signed packages). On the web it's currently impossible to bootstrap the integrity verification with just SRI.

This proposal aims at providing the same guarantees for web apps, without resorting to signed packages on the web (ie. not the same mechanism that FirefoxOS or ChromeOS apps used). It's competing with the IWA proposal from Google, which is a good thing.

> On the web, if your server is compromised it's game over, even if the publisher is not malicious. In app stores, you have some guarantee that the code that ends up on your device is what the publisher intended to ship (basically signed packages)

Not quite. It is possible for an account to be taken over or bought and a new update deployed. It is also possible for the server the app gets its data from to be taken over just like in your example and serve you fake data to make you regurgitate whatever data the malicious actor wants

Sorry, I should have been more concise - the two big differences are:

1) everyone gets the same code

2) it doesn't change too quickly

This means you can (esp with reproducible builds) audit that the code is correct and know that everyone is getting the correct code, and that misbehavior will be identified.

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