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xyzzy123yesterday at 9:27 PM2 repliesview on HN

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.


Replies

digiownyesterday at 9:48 PM

> total big tech capture of computing platforms

Correct. And the end of ownership, privacy, and truth too. If something can betray you on someone else's orders, it's not yours in the first place. You'll own nothing and if you aren't happy, good luck living in the woods.

ignoramousyesterday at 10:12 PM

> you work on mobile apps you will notice that full attestation is too slow to put in the login path

Hm, Play Integrity isn't that slow on Android, from my experience.

> don't think a good security engineer would rely on atty as "front line" anti brute force control since bypasses are not that rare

I'm not privy to device-wide bypasses of Play Integrity that ship with Trusted Execution Environment (which is pretty much all ARM based Androids), Secure Element, and/or Hardware Root of Trust, but I'd appreciate if you have some significant exploit writeups (on Pixels, preferably) for me to look at?

> My concern is that future where banks can "trust the client" is a future of total big tech capture of computing platforms

A valid concern. In the case of smart & personal devices like Androids though, the security is warranted due to the nature of the workloads it tends to support (think Pacemaker / Insulin monitoring apps; government-issued IDs; financial instruments like credit cards; etc) and the ubiquity & proliferation of the OS (more than half of all humanity) itself.

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