7 ms·

This should be somewhat alarming to anyone who already knows about WEI. I wonder if "x-browser-copyright" is an attempt at trying to use the legal system to st

This should be somewhat alarming to anyone who already knows about WEI. I wonder if "x-browser-copyright" is an attempt at trying to use the legal system to stifle competition and further their monopoly. If so, have they not heard of Sega v. Accolade ? I'm a bit amused that they're using SHA-1. Why not MD5, CRC32, or (as the dumb security scanners would recommend) even SHA256?

Retr0id 1y ago
SHA-1 is a head-scratcher for sure. I can only assume it's the flawed logic that it's "reasonably secure, but shorter than sha256". Flawed because SHA1 is broken, and SHA256 is faster on most hardware, and you can just truncate your SHA256 output if you really want it to be shorter.
- pinoy420 1y ago
  [dead]
- adrian_b 1y ago
  SHA-1 is broken for being used in digital signature algorithms or for any other application that requires collision resistance. There are a lot of applications for which collision resistance is irrelevant and for which the use of SHA-1 is fine, for instance in some random number generators. On the CPUs where I have tested this (with hardware instructions for both hashes, e.g. some Ryzen and some Aarch64), SHA-1 is faster than SHA-256, though the difference is not great. In this case, collision resistance appears irrelevant. There is no point in finding other strings that will produce the same validation hash. The correct input strings can be obtained by reverse engineering anyway, which has been done by the author. Here the hash was used just for slight obfuscation.
  - Retr0id 1y ago
    The perf difference between SHA1 and SHA256 was marginal on the systems I tested (3950x, M1 Pro), which makes SHA256 a no-brainer to me if you're just picking between those two (collision resistance is nice to have even if you "don't need it"). You're right that collision resistance doesn't really matter here, but there's a fair chance SHA1 will end up deprecated or removed from whatever cryptography library you're using for it, at some point in the future.
    - JimDabell 1y ago
      There’s also the downside of every engineer you onboard spending time raising the same concern, and being trained to ignore it. You want engineers to raise red flags when they see SHA-1! Sometimes something that looks wrong is bad even if it’s technically acceptable.
      - unscaled 1y ago
        Not just engineers. Many off-the-shelf static analysis tools would happily jump at every mention of a deprecated algorithm such as SHA1 in your code. It's just too much noise, and the performance cost of SHA-256 is negligible on modern computers. If digest size or speed on older machines is a concern, there are other options like Blake2/3. There probably(?) isn't any serious vulnerability in using SHA-1 for an integrity identifier that is based on a hard-coded "API key", but I think algorithm hygiene is always a good thing. You don't want to train your engineers to use broken algorithms like SHA-1, "because it might be ok, idk".
        adrian_b 1y ago
        It should be noted that using a parallelizable hash, like Blake2/3, does not provide higher speed by magic. Evaluating anything in parallel is a different compromise between the time and the power needed to perform a computation, i.e. with an N-way parallel evaluation you hope to reduce the time by almost N times, while increasing the power by a similar factor and not increasing much the energy required to do the computation. The time to compute a hash is not always the most important, especially when the hash computation can be overlapped with other data processing. In mobile and embedded applications the energy can be more important. In that case using the hardware instructions for SHA-256 or SHA-1 can provide energy savings over hashes like Blake2/3. So the best choice for a hash function can be affected by many factors, it is preferable not to choose automatically the same function regardless of the circumstances. Nowadays SHA-256 is widely supported in hardware and still secure enough for any application with an 128-bit security target, so it is OK as a default choice, but it may be not the best choice in many cases.
    - mjevans 1y ago
ulrikrasmussen 1y ago
I am also alarmed. Google has to split off its development of both Chrome and Android now, this crazy vertical integration is akin to a private company building and owning both the roads AND the cars. Sure, you can build other cars, but we just need to verify that your tires are safe before you can drive on OUR roads. It's fine as long as you build your car on our complete frame, you can still choose whatever color you like! Also, the car has ads.
- nurettin 1y ago
  Ok but The Road is the internet, how much of that does google/alphabet actually own?
  - ulrikrasmussen 1y ago
    All of YouTube. The vast majority of email. All sources of revenue for ad-funded sites, basically, except for those ads pushed by Meta in their respective walled gardens. They are also the gatekeepers deciding what parts of the internet the users actually see, and they continuously work towards preventing people from actually visiting other sites by siphoning off information and keeping users on Google (AMP, AI summaries). The whole Play Store ecosystem is a walled garden which pretends to be open by building on an ostensibly open source OS but adding strict integrity checks on top which gives Google the ultimate power to decide what is allowed to run on peoples phones. They don't have to own the servers and the pipes if they own all the clients, sources of revenue, distribution platforms and financial transaction systems.
    - nolok 1y ago
      The rest of your list is irrealistic but I had to react at least to this one : > The vast majority of email. Not even close, less than a third in reality I agree that google should be cut down, but if done then other tech giant should be too, otherwise we're just trading one master for another
      - CrossVR 1y ago
mindslight 1y ago
> have they not heard of Sega v. Accolade ? My mind went here immediately as well, but some details are subtly different. For example being a remote service instead of a locally-executed copy of software, Google could argue that they are materially relying on such representation to provide any service at all. Or that without access to the service's code, someone cannot prove this string is required in order to interoperate. It also wouldn't be the first time the current Supreme Court took advantage of slightly differing details as an excuse to reject longstanding precedent in favor of fascism.
- wongarsu 1y ago
  And even if it falls under fair use in the US, they could still have a case in some other relevant market. The world is a big place
  - userbinator 1y ago
    If anything, the EU is even more likely to consider it fair use for interoperability, which basically leaves Asia --- but Google's services are blocked in the biggest country there, so I'm not sure about that. They might be trying to do this in the US given the political climate, but then again, the current administration is decidedly unfriendly towards Big Tech in general.
PeterStuer 1y ago
WEI? As in Windows Experience Index? Can you elaborate?
- runiq 1y ago
  Web Environment Integrity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity
JimDabell 1y ago
> I wonder if "x-browser-copyright" is an attempt at trying to use the legal system to stifle competition and further their monopoly. If so, have they not heard of Sega v. Accolade ? My first thought was the Nintendo logo used for Gameboy game attestation. I wonder what a court would make of the copyright header. What original work is copyright being claimed for here? The HTTP request? If I used Chrome to POST this comment, would Google be claiming copyright over the POST request?
- notpushkin 1y ago
  com.apple.Dont_Steal_Mac_OS_X
lxgr 1y ago
Probably any cryptographic hash function would have done. My suspicion is that what they're trying to do here is similar to e.g. the "Readium LCP" DRM for ebooks (previously discussed at [1]): A "secret key" and a "proprietary algorithm" might possibly bring this into DMCA scope in a way that using only a copyrighted string might not. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43378627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43378627

Retr0id 1y ago

SHA-1 is a head-scratcher for sure. I can only assume it's the flawed logic that it's "reasonably secure, but shorter than sha256". Flawed because SHA1 is broken, and SHA256 is faster on most hardware, and you can just truncate your SHA256 output if you really want it to be shorter.

pinoy420 1y ago
[dead]
adrian_b 1y ago
SHA-1 is broken for being used in digital signature algorithms or for any other application that requires collision resistance. There are a lot of applications for which collision resistance is irrelevant and for which the use of SHA-1 is fine, for instance in some random number generators. On the CPUs where I have tested this (with hardware instructions for both hashes, e.g. some Ryzen and some Aarch64), SHA-1 is faster than SHA-256, though the difference is not great. In this case, collision resistance appears irrelevant. There is no point in finding other strings that will produce the same validation hash. The correct input strings can be obtained by reverse engineering anyway, which has been done by the author. Here the hash was used just for slight obfuscation.
- Retr0id 1y ago
  The perf difference between SHA1 and SHA256 was marginal on the systems I tested (3950x, M1 Pro), which makes SHA256 a no-brainer to me if you're just picking between those two (collision resistance is nice to have even if you "don't need it"). You're right that collision resistance doesn't really matter here, but there's a fair chance SHA1 will end up deprecated or removed from whatever cryptography library you're using for it, at some point in the future.
  - JimDabell 1y ago
    There’s also the downside of every engineer you onboard spending time raising the same concern, and being trained to ignore it. You want engineers to raise red flags when they see SHA-1! Sometimes something that looks wrong is bad even if it’s technically acceptable.
    - unscaled 1y ago
      Not just engineers. Many off-the-shelf static analysis tools would happily jump at every mention of a deprecated algorithm such as SHA1 in your code. It's just too much noise, and the performance cost of SHA-256 is negligible on modern computers. If digest size or speed on older machines is a concern, there are other options like Blake2/3. There probably(?) isn't any serious vulnerability in using SHA-1 for an integrity identifier that is based on a hard-coded "API key", but I think algorithm hygiene is always a good thing. You don't want to train your engineers to use broken algorithms like SHA-1, "because it might be ok, idk".
      - adrian_b 1y ago
        It should be noted that using a parallelizable hash, like Blake2/3, does not provide higher speed by magic. Evaluating anything in parallel is a different compromise between the time and the power needed to perform a computation, i.e. with an N-way parallel evaluation you hope to reduce the time by almost N times, while increasing the power by a similar factor and not increasing much the energy required to do the computation. The time to compute a hash is not always the most important, especially when the hash computation can be overlapped with other data processing. In mobile and embedded applications the energy can be more important. In that case using the hardware instructions for SHA-256 or SHA-1 can provide energy savings over hashes like Blake2/3. So the best choice for a hash function can be affected by many factors, it is preferable not to choose automatically the same function regardless of the circumstances. Nowadays SHA-256 is widely supported in hardware and still secure enough for any application with an 128-bit security target, so it is OK as a default choice, but it may be not the best choice in many cases.
  - mjevans 1y ago

ulrikrasmussen 1y ago

I am also alarmed. Google has to split off its development of both Chrome and Android now, this crazy vertical integration is akin to a private company building and owning both the roads AND the cars. Sure, you can build other cars, but we just need to verify that your tires are safe before you can drive on OUR roads. It's fine as long as you build your car on our complete frame, you can still choose whatever color you like! Also, the car has ads.

nurettin 1y ago
Ok but The Road is the internet, how much of that does google/alphabet actually own?
- ulrikrasmussen 1y ago
  All of YouTube. The vast majority of email. All sources of revenue for ad-funded sites, basically, except for those ads pushed by Meta in their respective walled gardens. They are also the gatekeepers deciding what parts of the internet the users actually see, and they continuously work towards preventing people from actually visiting other sites by siphoning off information and keeping users on Google (AMP, AI summaries). The whole Play Store ecosystem is a walled garden which pretends to be open by building on an ostensibly open source OS but adding strict integrity checks on top which gives Google the ultimate power to decide what is allowed to run on peoples phones. They don't have to own the servers and the pipes if they own all the clients, sources of revenue, distribution platforms and financial transaction systems.
  - nolok 1y ago
    The rest of your list is irrealistic but I had to react at least to this one : > The vast majority of email. Not even close, less than a third in reality I agree that google should be cut down, but if done then other tech giant should be too, otherwise we're just trading one master for another
    - CrossVR 1y ago

mindslight 1y ago

> have they not heard of Sega v. Accolade ? My mind went here immediately as well, but some details are subtly different. For example being a remote service instead of a locally-executed copy of software, Google could argue that they are materially relying on such representation to provide any service at all. Or that without access to the service's code, someone cannot prove this string is required in order to interoperate. It also wouldn't be the first time the current Supreme Court took advantage of slightly differing details as an excuse to reject longstanding precedent in favor of fascism.

wongarsu 1y ago
And even if it falls under fair use in the US, they could still have a case in some other relevant market. The world is a big place
- userbinator 1y ago
  If anything, the EU is even more likely to consider it fair use for interoperability, which basically leaves Asia --- but Google's services are blocked in the biggest country there, so I'm not sure about that. They might be trying to do this in the US given the political climate, but then again, the current administration is decidedly unfriendly towards Big Tech in general.

PeterStuer 1y ago

WEI? As in Windows Experience Index? Can you elaborate?

runiq 1y ago
Web Environment Integrity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity

JimDabell 1y ago

> I wonder if "x-browser-copyright" is an attempt at trying to use the legal system to stifle competition and further their monopoly. If so, have they not heard of Sega v. Accolade ? My first thought was the Nintendo logo used for Gameboy game attestation. I wonder what a court would make of the copyright header. What original work is copyright being claimed for here? The HTTP request? If I used Chrome to POST this comment, would Google be claiming copyright over the POST request?

notpushkin 1y ago
com.apple.Dont_Steal_Mac_OS_X

lxgr 1y ago

Probably any cryptographic hash function would have done. My suspicion is that what they're trying to do here is similar to e.g. the "Readium LCP" DRM for ebooks (previously discussed at [1]): A "secret key" and a "proprietary algorithm" might possibly bring this into DMCA scope in a way that using only a copyrighted string might not. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43378627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43378627