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miki123211yesterday at 9:04 PM1 replyview on HN

It's an anti-brute-force mechanism. It's not for you, it's for all the other accounts that an unattested phone (or a bot posing as an unattested phone that just stole somebody's credentials via some 0-day data exfiltration exploit) may be trying to access.

Sure, banks could probably build a mechanism that lets some users opt out of this, just as they could add a Klingon localization to their apps. There just isn't enough demand.


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xyzzy123yesterday at 9:27 PM

If you work on mobile apps you will notice that full attestation is too slow to put in the login path. [This might be better than it used to be, now in 2026].

I don't think a good security engineer would rely on atty as "front line" anti brute force control since bypasses are not that rare. But yeah you might incorporate it into the flow. Just like captchas, rate limiting, fingerprints etc and all the other controls you need for web, anyway.

I know I'm quibbling. My concern is that future where banks can "trust the client" is a future of total big tech capture of computing platforms, and I know banks and government don't really care, but I do.

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