Gregory's Server@delroth you're equating bots with, what, bruteforce attempts on user passwords? which is an extremely mitigable problem that's entirely solved by passkey usage
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7 comments
 @rcombs Google isn't just fighting that on one front, they've been strongly pushing for 2FA for years. They were the first to deploy Security Keys for a reason. There's been many efforts to try and bind session tokens to devices too. Example: Channel ID. Unfortunately not successful. The "defense front" you're seeing is trying to detect suspicious actions coming from non legitimate devices. If someone gmail-searches "SSN" and you can detect it's not a real browser, you can issue a challenge. @rcombs this isn't really the appropriate format to try and summarize 3 years of learning about this in the field, working with probably some of the foremost experts in the field. I also likely will get into NDA things pretty quickly with more details. Those experts are people I recognize in the list of authors of the proposal. They're people that have spent their whole career working on protecting users from data theft / impersonation. I personally trust that they have done their homework. @rcombs another angle: do you think those people don't know how bad such a proposal looks, especially coming from Google? Look at the list of non-goals, the number of counter-measures they propose to avoid this being too abusable, etc. They clearly understand your viewpoint as well, to some extent. And yet they still thought it would be a good move to publish this proposal. Do you think they would have done so if "this ain't gonna solve that case" (or rather: "help", you can't "solve" abuse)?  |
@rcombs in general: there are 10-100s active full-time criminal groups targeting Google users at all times. Some are interested in stealing SSNs and passport photos from gmail. Some are interested in stolen credit cards (via reselling tradeable in-game items in Play Store games, for example). Some deploy cryptolockers on Google Drive.
Often they either have credentials, phish them, or have session tokens stolen by malware on device. Passkey/2FA helps, but doesn't prevent the latter.