reCAPTCHA Mobile Verification Is Bringing the Play Integrity API to Desktops
discuss.grapheneos.org
discuss.grapheneos.org
They're publicly agreeing that only users using their approved mobile devices are allowed to do banking, and competitors cannot. I'm not sure how much more clearly anti-competitive this could be.
And, r/android being mostly google worshipers won't say anything, but also it's difficult to parse through such a huge ai generated post.
New data isolation and verification tools
Expanded Binary Transparency: Anyone can now verify that the critical software layers on their device were actually authorized by Google and haven't been secretly modified by attackers. We are publishing a public, append-only ledger that provides cryptographic proof that production Google applications and Mainline Modules are the authentic versions released by Google. If a Google-signed app isn’t on this ledger, we didn’t intend to release it.
Android OS verification: We have seen some bad actors begin to distribute malicious, unofficial versions of the Android OS that secretly compromise device integrity. To combat this, we are introducing Android OS verification in Android 17. Launching initially on Pixel devices, this feature helps you verify that your device is running an official, widely distributed build.
Keeping your ambient data confidential and isolated: Android 17 introduces AISeal with pKVM which, along with Private AI Compute, creates an isolated, verifiable, hardware-backed environment where ambient data can be processed securelyThat's the only part I'm interested in. I've read this article - or something similar - before and it doesn't surprise me that these big tech companies want more control. What I don't understand is how this affects linux desktop?
Is it going to be that online services or websites or webapps can choose to require attestation? Whether you use this OS or that OS? Or are linux developers forced to change their open source software?
The only possible reason for this is to lock out the competition.
Well, this is how Google will kill all the scrapers on its search data.
> Fraud Defense leverages a sophisticated and adaptable risk analysis engine to shield against automated software. It is specifically designed to orchestrate trust for the agentic web, neutralizing malicious scrapers while welcoming legitimate AI agents.
I'm sure it'll block a whole bunch of awful scrapers but if Google doesn't hate a bot, it'll be able to pass.
My only hope left is that the EU will step in and prevent this. At least in Europe.
Google Cloud fraud defense, the next evolution of reCAPTCHA
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48039362
Google broke reCAPTCHA for de-googled Android users
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48067119
Google Cloud Fraud Defence is just WEI repackaged
Like with reCAPTCHA, there are other services and libraries out there to detect root access and other things companies want to detect in their apps.
> Like with reCAPTCHA, there are other services and libraries out there to detect root access and other things companies want to detect in their apps.
My opinion on this is that any method to check integrity, root access or if developer mode is enabled is a security vulnerability by itself, no such app should be able to know that.
I think knowledge of such information should be available to all apps, but I think apps should not be so annoyingly restrictive. There's absolutely no reason why games or generic apps need to act on any of this information.
It's been misused by banking app and games, I've never seen a legitimate use case.
If I were a bank I wouldn't want to be on the hook for someone getting their bank account drained by the custom ROM someone downloaded from XDA.
Then there's the DRM thing, where copyright owners make companies like Netflix sign a document like "if you don't enforce strong DRM, you cannot serve our media". Their choice is either use DRM (which in turn uses integrity checking) or not serve you at all. As a user, you once again have the choice of "buy the box set" or "use a smartphone with a trusted OS".
There's also the corporate use case, companies have remote wipe capabilities for data integrity purposes and don't want their employees rooting phones.
Pokemon Go used it to check whether people were spoofing their location and ruining the game for others. They were especially assholish about it, but that should hardly be a surprise when Nintendo is involved at any part of the chain.
Any game with in-app purchases wants to verify that nobody messed with the APK to get paid content for free. It's almost a basic business requirement. Combining limited-lifetime remote attestation tokens with data fetch URLs means superweatherapp-patched-luckypatcher.apk on LineageOS will not be able to pretend to be the real app (GPlay on stock Android already offers app verification APIs).
In Google's case, "this is a physical device and not an emulator" is a strong signal that the user is not a bot pretending to be a human. In an age where CAPTCHAs are easier to solve for AI than they are for humans, that kind of verification is worth a lot.
I'm sure I'm missing a lot of use cases here, but the technology is useful. It's often used in apps and games I would never want to run on my phone anyway, except for banking apps perhaps.
Integrity doesn't prevent customers to download a fake banking app, DRMs should be legally banned to be honest (sorry/not sorry media companies) and passports are best in physical form.
For company usage, locking the bootloader accomplishes the same thing.
As for bots, it doesn't prevent bots as you have unmodified device farms on racks. It's actually how ad fraud is done at the moment, they don't bother modifying the devices.
Pushing integrity even more will just funnel even more money to this ad fraud mafia as they will have a new source of revenue.
Integrity detection means criminals cannot just inject some code into an existing banking app APK and call it a day. The hacked app won't generate valid HTTPS calls when properly validated. You can still phish users, but instead of automated online phishing panels, you need someone with a physical phone copying everything the user enters. It significantly raises the bar for these criminals.
If this stuff wasn't available, we just wouldn't have a lot of useful apps that we do today. The technology itself isn't bad per se, but the combination of a lack of hardware manufacturer support (for doing things like locking down bootloaders), custom ROM support (because bootloaders aren't locked down anyway), and app developer interest (see the whole GrapheneOS story) are what causes problems. Restricting the technology because the companies you deal with are shit is a bad solution in my opinion, because if they are motivated to be shit, they will find other ways to be shit.
For instance, someone set up an alternative attestation company that's even worse than Apple and Google, and if it weren't for Play Integrity, they'd be making the APIs and whitelists instead of Google.
That statement is simply not true. The demand for streaming services would still be there. There would simply be even more illegal alternatives than there already are, so companies would still be forced to offer movies and TV shows via streaming. They only have the choice between offering DRM-free content and making money, or making no money while people watch it anyway.
that's a false dichotomy since piracy exists. Stop giving them money until their behavior changes. If it doesn't... oh well, you still get a better service.
Piracy isn't even a better service at all. Almost nothing in my native language is available on pirate sites unless you pay more than the subscription service charges. Subtitles take three or four internet searches and sometimes aren't available at all. Audio tracks default to Russian or Italian or Spanish for English-language shows. I have set up a whole Rube Goldberg machine of radarr/sonarr/lidarr + bazarr + prowlarr + Deluge + Jellyfin to watch stuff and only after all that did piracy became slightly less of a bother.
Hardware attestation kills privacy- yes. But it also works.
Mobile phones are ridiculously locked down compared to legacy platforms such as Windows.
When it comes to GrapheneOS, it's the website owners that decided to block those devices by using this service. There are other services that don't block those phones they can use instead.
Apple+Google got punished by the EU for non-competitive practices and now they offered to ordinary websites their most desired features: bot blocking and unavoidable user tracking across all devices and operating systems.
And if EU wants to sue, they'll have to sue each and every website that requires this, and they would loose, because there are no alternatives and even if there were, they would be just as bad.
Great job Google+Apple! I'm proud of you. /s
Thats right: that the user can’t do what they want with their own device. Obviously your key wouldn’t be trusted if they could.
There is no other conceivable purpose that attestation could serve.
Yes, they are. If there's a thread on HN about user-hostile features, you can be pretty confident that they've written a comment defending it.
>the user can’t do what they want with their own device
In the same way the user can't make their device have the Microsoft Word app send them $1 million from Microsoft's bank account. Once other people are in the picture you can't always have your way.
“Prison isn’t against being able to go wherever you want.”
> There are many changes that are possible which do not harm the integrity of applications.
“Well there’s a lot of places you can go in prison, you just can’t leave.”
Uh-huh.
> In the same way the user can't make their device have the Microsoft Word app send them $1 million from Microsoft's bank account.
This is completely incoherent. You and I both know that a bank refusing to give away someone else’s money has nothing to do with being able to run whatever code and operating systems we want to on our own devices.
Obviously the decision happens on some remote server which would require a username and password to authorize. It doesn’t matter one bit what piece of code sent it over.
This isn't a good analogy since the user really able to do whatever they want with their computer. A better analogy is that. "You can go wherever you want, but if you are trespassing on other people's property they can report you to the police." Just because you have the freedom to go anywhere does not mean you are not accountable for your actions or that people should not be able to tell that you are trespassing.
>has nothing to do with being able to run whatever code and operating systems we want to on our own devices.
My point is that one's freedom of how they want one's computer to work does not mean they can force other people's server to run code they want. Microsoft is in control of what there servers do.
Currently it's trespassing-style. If you modify your Google client, Google reserves the right to ban you.
With attestation it's prison-style: you can't modify your Google client. If you try, the modified client just won't work. Trying to walk out of the prison wall does not actually put you outside - you just bang into the wall and then you are still inside.
It's technically possible to exploit a kernel and get root access on a running device, of course, but the persistent root that is used most often will be detected by hardware integrity mechanisms. Exploit based root might be as well if it makes itself detectable enough.
My Galaxy S10, last update in 2023 passes strong integrity.
With the little amount of security updates most Android devices have, I'm pretty sure you can find an exploit for pretty much everything except the most expensive flagships.
What does integrity really means when nobody really knows what's in the device and with a terrible software update policy anyways.
MEETS_STRONG_INTEGRITY
The app is running on a genuine and certified Android device with a recent security update.
On Android 13 and higher, the MEETS_STRONG_INTEGRITY verdict requires MEETS_DEVICE_INTEGRITY and security updates in the last year for all partitions of the device, including an Android OS partition patch and a vendor partition patch.
On Android 12 and lower, the MEETS_STRONG_INTEGRITY verdict only requires hardware-backed proof of boot integrity and does not require the device to have a recent security update. Therefore, when using the MEETS_STRONG_INTEGRITY, it is recommended to also take into account the Android SDK version in the deviceAttributes field.
A single device will return multiple device labels in the device integrity verdict if each of the label's criteria is met.
Also, there is still the DEVICE_INTEGRITY check that verifies the hardware side of things so if old devices have to be pushed, app developers still won't let you run their apps on LineageOS
It has happened and it probably will happen again. The EU is working on a wallet app that will be legally equivalent to an ID card, I imagine they'll rather have people stick to their plastic ID rather than risk accepting identity theft.
In turn, this enables any tyrannical or anti-competitive demand which can be implemented in software, such as "user is not on the blasphemer list" or "all communications are being CC'ed to the Ministry of Truth."
It has, but extracted keys aren't free.
It seems like the documentation for the feature is aimed entirely at MDM setups, though.
The basic API requirements are all there, and Windows 11 requires TPM 2.0, so I believe it should be possible for Google to build a Play Integrity equivalent around that.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/devicecheck/dcappa...