There is no advantage.
"User privacy is enhanced as the issuer does not learn which web application is making the request as the request is mediated by the browser." Every web application nowadays send you a welcome, onboarding, reminder after the verification. (No user privacy enhancement)
So we get a new process that solves nothing, but makes everything complicated. (And complicated helps the big and hurt the little in th long run)
Not verified but feels like a Google draft that closes the web.
The privacy advantage is also significant and real: no, not every web app sends an onboarding reminder, and the current state of web apps came to be without this functionality, so you can expect behaviour changes for those services that value the privacy, plus new services/authentication options to spring up that weren’t previously possible.
So instead, there’s no verification mail and it’s the next message, the one that you actually wanted, that gets blocked or sent to spam.
The “privacy advantage” that the issuer can’t learn the identity of the application that wants to send mail seems to me to be a significant functional liability. If it instead produced a token that said to the email service provider “see, the message was invited”, now that would be useful. (It would raise concerns of its own, but it would at least be useful.)
Example: you can make orders from mlb online without verifying your email, and then you get marketing emails regularly. In that case, I was able to call the very senior citizen who thought he could just use any address he wanted.
I can't remember the dating app that let someone sign up mobile using my email address... I hijacked the account (password recovery) and changed the prompts to "I'm an idiot that doesn't know how email works." ...
Depending which privacy, currently if I input a email into xyz noone can trust that this email belongs to me. In the future every email input can verify if the mail belongs to me, that scream abuse and more new things that try to fix the old.
The auth mechanism flows through the cookies, assuming the email provider offers a web browser and the user is signed in this could be seamless, although I'm not certain the cookie could be safely read cross site without risk or without being blocked by the browse
It wouldn't be simple to implement but not impossible, and it sounds like it would cost nothing to the user, it could work behind the scenes. Like as a user you are logged in to gmail or zoho mail in your browser. You sihn up for another service and you didn't get a confirmation email, just a welcome email. No fucks are given, it just works.
Mobile does this with autofilling auth codes sometimes with sms, so there's precedent.
Congrats OP the idea looks feasible. I'm usually the ackshually guy looking for the nitpick, but it looks nice. Will check the technicals later, cause the devil is in the details.
I think there is benefit to this because folding some identity primitives into the browser helps the user (in UX, in security). This was certainly true of password managers.
The other comments talk about how you will need to have a fallback. That is certainly true. But just because you have to have a fallback doesn't mean you can't improve things.
> Every web application nowadays send you a welcome, onboarding, reminder after the verification. (No user privacy enhancement)
But would they need to if they could trust info coming from the browser?
0: I wrote an intro to this here: https://www.infoq.com/articles/federated-credentials-managem...
I can't tell you how many times email verification context switches made me completely lose track of what I was doing.
There's literally no worse context switch than having to go into your inbox, wait for an email, then come back to the appropriate tab to complete registration or login.
There are probably dozens, maybe hundreds, of services I never finished registering for all on account of this problem.
I worked authc/authz and security for a large fintech and we constantly butted heads against the growth folks. They fought hard and eventually won the right to do account creation and IDV without email verification. You don't have to verify your email until you're already making transactions, and that does wonders for growth. We're still accountable for all the stringent KYC regulations, of course.
Sounds like a useful and very effective filter to not create accounts for things that do not really matters to you.
What's worse they are often unique AND delivered out of order AND have no timestamp or sequence number. So you get to guess which is the newest, using any other fails, and the ones that succeed often time out before they can be used.
Having an expiration date as short as 15 minutes seems insane and counter productive.
Then it's something maybe the customer isn't interested in the first place. Most of the time mail just works for me only issues are sometimes greylisting and it takes hours.
I can understand it from the company side, but not sure how well it really works when someone use a mail app on mobile and on desktop not even logged into the mail account.
* It's not clear if this service would be provided by a third party (in which case, the problem has merely just been moved) or the email provider. It sounds like the former, but in case it's the latter, then this doesn't have as big an impact I guess.
** While _I_ as the owner of an email address can decisively know that all emails of the form `myname+<whatever>@myemail.com` will go to me, you as the owner of a website attempting to verify my email cannot know that. The standards specify that + is valid in an email user part, but they do not require plus addressing to work.
I'll put this on the backlog of things to implement if I'm incredibly bored and want to weaken the security of my infrastructure.
Perhaps you mistook the two bullet points outlining what currently happens as goals for the standard?
If the email address isn't yet known to this third party (or, you are not logged in), there _will_ be a context switch which in my example case will occur for every registration since I use a per-entity email address.
<my initials>-site-<companyname>@<my domain> go to my personal mailbox
<my partner's initials>-app-<appname>@<her domain> go to my partner's mailbox
<daughter initials>-account-<entity name>@<my domain> go to my daughter's account
Sure you could in theory set up the server side verification mecanism for these pattern too. I am just stating that the +suffix stuff is not the only way used.
The protocol proposes to alleviate a UX burden. The back and forth.
it would need Google (and other email provider supporting the + trick) to allow you to certify your ownership of a wild card set of email addresses, i.e anything matching what's before the + and the protocol would work just the same. Absolutely reducing some friction without adding you the extra burden your trick currently involves.
Neither, I do it so I can track which companies sold my email address on without my permission so I can put them on my shit list / report them to my government / shame them on the internet / whatever.
> The protocol proposes to alleviate a UX burden. The back and forth.
That seems to be _one_ aspect but that assumes you're logged into whatever email verification provider is in use.
> it would need Google (and other email provider supporting the + trick) to allow you to certify your ownership of a wild card set of email addresses, i.e anything matching what's before the + and the protocol would work just the same. Absolutely reducing some friction without adding you the extra burden your trick currently involves.
You assume that it's the email provider which has to implement this, which isn't so clear to me.
Only the email provider can attest that + addressing is in place, if a third party is involved, they can only explicitly match on full email addresses.
Like I said in my original comment, if it's the email provider that has to implement this, then the bulk of my issue is gone. Aside from the fact that now, as my own email provider, I have to implement this protocol somehow (easier said than done given my current infrastructure approach is aimed towards moving as many things into a non internet facing network).
random @ SpecificDomainOnlyYouUse .tld ?
Not sure they’d let you register foo+1 at Gmail or force you to choose foo or foo1 and plus accordingly later
1) Not all email providers will implement this, and
2) Users may not be signed into their email at the moment they signup
As a developer, I would find it easier to have one "verification code" flow for all users rather than fragmenting the process; it's much easier to document for your support staff. Again, not a bad proposal but perhaps not very useful in practice.
But that does relate to I keep wanting an email claim for Passkeys. A user's browser/OS could verify an email address once and then associate it with a Passkey. Passkeys might be a good place for that (as Persona/BrowserID suggested). Obviously some browsers could lie about verifying the email address in the claim and there might still need to be more steps to it, but if you are already taking Passkeys it doesn't necessarily add an entirely different flow to accept a verified email claim from a Passkey (and/or decide you don't trust that Passkey's claim and trigger your regular verification code flow).
This protocol solves a pretty contrived problem ("By sending the email verification code, the inbox provider knows the user is using that service!") by making email verification exponentially more complex, with only one correct flow, and will only work for domains that have opted in and configured this protocol.
Importantly, the protocol seems to rely on 1st party web cookies, which means you could no longer run a "pure" MTA that offers IMAP; you would need to have some web interface where your users can log in, even if there is no webmail functionality.
The bigger question is: why would the company who is hosting the email have any economic incentive to invest time and money in implementing and maintaining this protocol which currently has zero adoption? It's a chicken-and-egg with no upside.
I agree with a lot of what you are saying, but I think the main motivation is actually trying to reduce friction for the user to verify their email, which is good for the user, because it makes registration easier, and good for the company, because less users bounce at the email registration step.
But yeah, this is quite complicated, and there isn't a lot of motivation for email providers to implement it.
It’s not about efficient, effective solutions. It’s about control. Something you have to look at with WICG and W3C is the source of proposals and drafts.
* It's putting surveillance companies even more in the loop, building on the recent "log in with [surveillance company]" buttons, while existing login methods are destroyed through dark pattern practices or simply removed.
* It can be a ready-made platform, waiting for the next authoritarian government directives that say, now that everyone is hooked up or can easily be hooked up, turn on oppressive feature X, Y, or Z for all targeted Web sites/people.
Or maybe creating some sort of reduced OAuth "Anonymous-Site-Verifying-Your-Email-Exists" flow?
Just don't see the need to reinvent OAuth but with a reduced scope for just email validation. Just add a happy path for this into OAuth itself?
Another is that there is a lot of variance in OIDC and OAuth implementations, so getting login to work with any arbitrary identity provider is quite difficult.
OIDC actually does have a discovery mechanism standardized to convert an email address into an authoritative issuer. Then, it has a dynamic registration mechanism standardized so that an application could register to new issuers automatically. Those standards could absolutely be improved, but they already exist.
The problem is that no one that mattered implemented them.
If you want to get anywhere with something like this, you need buy-in from the big email providers(Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Apple) and the big enterprise single sign on providers(Ping, OneIdentity, and Okta). All of those companies already do OIDC fairly well. If they wanted this feature to exist, it already would.
Instead, it seems like big tech is all-in on passkeys instead of fixing single sign on.
Oooh I like this idea!
The signup protocol and user flow is the same if the feature is supported or not. You just skip a step if the convenience feature is supported.
With SSO the user is inconvenienced with an additional option at sign up and login, and there's the risk of duplicate accounts. Also stronger vendor lock in.
God forbid I accidentally make an account with SSO and another with email but the same email. I'd rather just always use email, it's supposed to be a convenience, the advantages are lost when it goes south once
If they do it correctly, that shouldn't be possible.
Also I'm pretty sure that since google is itself an SSO provider, this add another layer of clusterfuck that I don't even want to think about, regardless of whether there's a clean implementation or not, I don't even want that on my mental capacity.
This looks broadly similar to that, but with some newer primitives (SD-JWT) and a focus on autocomplete as an entrypoint to the flow. If I recall correctly, the entire JOSE suite (JWT, JWK, JWE, etc.) was still under active iteration while we were building Persona.
And hey, I applaud the effort. Persona got a lot of things right, and I still think we as an industry can do better than Passkeys.
For historic interest, the Persona After Action Report has a few key insights from when we spun down the project: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/Persona_AAR
I like the idea in general - an OIDC-like flow without needing any a priori setup. But, the RP has only a signed token with the pubkey in DNS, so this doesn't prove anything about the user unless the RP also verifies against some trusted and known email providers. This is absolutely awful for the Internet and makes sure power stays concentrated. PLEASE don't let this become a thing.
Second, this doesn't improve privacy. Most RPs will send an email right at signup, or soon thereafter. Thus the email provider does learn of the individual's association with that web application.
A last issue that's immediately obvious, is that you have to use a webmail interface.
But after some work the team scoped down, to focusing on email verification. I think that's what lead to this spec? https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/rwu9w...