Brave Enhances Its “Sign-in With Ethereum” and CoW Swap Features

Here’s a thought exercise: what is the most impactful thing you could make in just 10 days? Thirty years before creating the crypto-enabled  Brave browser in 2015, Brendan Eich was a young developer at Netscape, the company Marc Andreessen co-founded with fellow entrepreneur and computer scientist Jim Clark after coding the first web browser as a student at the University of Illinois. Eich was charged with creating a working prototype of a new computer scripting language in a week in order to compete with Microsoft.

He succeeded, and what is now known as JavaScript is the most popular programming language, used by 68% of developers according to a survey by Stack Overflow, as it makes possible the interactivity and dynamic features of approximately 98% of the world’s websites. Released the same year as the Ethereum blockchain, Eich’s vision for the Brave browser was perhaps equally ambitious: to create a browser that prioritizes user privacy and delivers a faster, more efficient browsing experience. As Modern Consensus wrote in a 2018 story, This browser will pay you in crypto:

“Most ad revenue systems are somewhat hostile to both users and advertisers. You—the consumer—have an ad between you and the content you’re downloading on your data plan. Meanwhile, the website publisher has little incentive to prove you’re actually consuming the ad they sold on your behalf. Now Eich has delivered a new platform that users runs on the ether-based Basic Attention Token (BAT) to improve the ad experience for users, advertisers, and publishers.”

This proactive stance against intrusive ads and trackers was designed to block unwanted content by default, resulting in faster page load times and a cleaner online experience for users, and it resonated with people increasingly concerned about privacy and the intrusive nature of online advertising. The BAT token serves multiple roles, including being the reward mechanism in Brave’s rewards program, enabling users to support content creators by contributing BAT tokens, acting as a medium of exchange for privacy-preserving advertising, compensating users for viewing Brave Ads, and being stored in the integrated cryptocurrency wallet for user management and distribution to content creators.

Enhancing Sign-in With Ethereum

Brave’s version 1.60 release last week introduces two features that enhance the security and user experience of signing messages with the wallet: Sign-In With Ethereum (SIWE) gets a significant overhaul and the redesigned signing experience is expanded to CoW Swap orders.

Available in basic form since the initial Brave launch, SIWE shifts the role of authentication away from large centralized identity providers and into the hands of the individual by taking problematic traditional login methods such as username and password or via Web2 platform like Google or Facebook – and replacing it with wallet-based sign-in functionality. This also allows one’s wallet login to be stamped with the “indelible ink” of an Ethereum wallet address of one’s choosing. Now, in addition to displaying prompts as human-readable plaintext messages without any validation by the wallet, Brave has improved the safety of signing into third-party apps and services by helping prevent phishing attacks.

“We’re excited about our recent SIWE and CoW updates because they make Brave Wallet safer and more straightforward for users,” Anirudha Bose, Web3 Staff Engineer at Brave, told Modern Consensus via email. “Adding support for ERC-4361 makes authenticating with Ethereum accounts a clear and safe experience, offering a self-custodial alternative to centralized identity providers, and our collaboration with CoW Swap enables Brave Wallet to display simple and concise views of token swaps.”

Additional security for CoW Swap trade orders

One of the many successful crypto tools descended from the original Gnosis project incubated by ConsenSys, CoW Swap introduced a novel approach to on-chain asset trading using the “coincidence of wants” (thus CoW) concept rooted in economics and the barter system. Built on the CoW Protocol, this trading interface employs batch auctions for price discovery. Users express off-chain intents through signed messages, enabling a gasless experience. However, the challenge lies in the security risks associated with blindly signing off-chain messages, as highlighted by a December 2022 scam that exploited a gasless Seaport message to steal NFTs worth over 852 ETH.

To address security concerns and improve user experience, hacker teams from Brave and CoW Swap collaborated on a solution at DappCon 2023. They developed a message parser for CoW orders, ensuring users can easily comprehend order details, such as formatted amounts, token symbols, and logos, before approving signing requests. The parser is specifically tied to the type hash of CoW Swap’s order struct, enhancing security by preventing its use on non-CoW messages. Additionally, the teams implemented calldata parsers for on-chain transactions within the swapping process, enhancing transparency and user confidence in signing requests involving native assets like ETH or XDAI.