A new web browser built on a new HTTP protocol that accepts a human identity glove using cryptography. Instead of using your fingers directly on a mouse or trackpad, you wear a hardware glove that continuously records your pulse and your fingerprint, your machine information, and the average movement map that is unique to you as you interact with your device. The glove encrypts all of this information in real time. The browser then constantly verifies the glove hardware is present and active. No physical glove with a valid identity? No page loads.
What if someone tries to emulate the glove?
This is where the new browser becomes the second line of defense. It continuously checks the hardware signature and serial number of the glove. You can attempt to emulate it all you want, but the probability of simultaneously spoofing the correct fingerprint, a continuous and believable human pulse, a personalized movement map, and the exact hardware serial number is as close to impossible as any security system can get.
What do you all think of this as a preliminary idea?
Ok, so you’re talking about technologies that already exist and practically everyone has them.
First, you don’t need a new HTTP protocol, you’d use regular HTTPS with certificate authentication.
The glove you speak of is a biometric device with a Secure Enclave (SE) (eg Apple Watch) or secure access to a device with an SE.
This SE stores the private key of a key pair in a manner inaccessible without biometrics. This is also how PassKeys work.
A key challenge here is that everyone has a variety of devices from a variety of OEMs that are all simultaneously talking to multiple services synchronously. More often than not, a web request actually isn’t initiated by a human.
So, you’ll need to get everyone to agree on a standard. You’ll need to address the privacy concerns of privacy-minded people, because if you can attest that a person is actually there, doing something that is going to set off warning bells for private people. It’s also going to set off dinner bells for advertisers and governments.
Again sorry, I’m on mobile and in a line. These exact scenarios (and their drawbacks) are routinely discussed in technical and privacy circles.
Read up on technologies like PKI, certificate-based Auth, PassKeys, Secure Enclave, and biometric devices. The Apple Platform Security Guide is a good first step on what a commercial product is already doing.
You didn't mention anything about how the web server knows if the other end of the connection is this user-hostile browser or a python/javascript bot with a spoofed user agent.
This would always need some backup solution and now you're back on square one.
Edit: also you'd need accessibility, so a glove is out. And how do you handle game consoles? Voice assistants like Siri or Alexa?
Even aside from the hardware aspect of it, or the ick factor of biometrics to use the web, or possibly launching it and getting full adoption, or the fact that it absolutely could have the data spoofed, or that new attacks would be developed to MITM someone's pulse and mirror it on their bot's connection...
Where is this validation happening? Not on every transaction to every web server, surely. How could a HTTP protocol possibly actually achieve this kind of validation?