Comment by tardedmeme

7 days ago

That's why everyoneisover18.com forwards the request to my bank or my broker and gets my signature on the behalf of literally anyone. I may charge them $5 for this service.

> That's why everyoneisover18.com forwards the request to my bank or my broker

Doesn't work. The response won't be signed by real-broker.com.

The permission request/response itself goes direct from the server at restricted-site.com to the server at real-broker.com over TLS, so you can't MITM it, it's not controlled by the client and you won't be able to just pass out a cached response.

Your malicious client plugin could potentially forward the client session details to you, so you could operate the broker page, then log in to your bank's portal and approve that request, but I don't think that's going to scale very well and I imagine your bank is likely going to rate limit you.

  • real-broker opens a web page allowing them to verify somehow. The browser extension sends me their URL and cookies so I can load the same page and verify myself. All automated of course.

    • You could, you could also go to their house and go through the process for them, but in either case I don't think it's going to scale very well (rate-limiting would seem to be called for, maybe with 2FA as well, to mitigate this sort of thing and remove the possibilities for automation).

      But sure, you could subvert it on a small scale, just as you can borrow someone else's driving license to register in 'normal' systems already. You could also register an account, validate it and then sell the login details, regardless of what proof of age scheme you use.

      The point is the scheme is no worse at validation than asking for ID and it protects user privacy by keeping all ID details away from individual websites, which is the more important part IMHO.

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