[MUSIC PLAYING]
DOM ELLIOTT: Hi, I'm Dom.
I'm a Product Manager on the Google Play Developer team.
SOLÉNE MAÍTRE: And I'm Soléne, a Product Manager on the Device
Integrity Team at Google.
Android is an amazing platform for apps and games.
There are so many experiences to enjoy.
The majority of users have good intentions
and enjoy using apps and playing games the way
they are intended.
However, there are always actors who are less well-intentioned.
This means you have to deal with abuse, such as cheating,
tampering, fraud, theft, piracy, unauthorized access.
Abuse often originates from untrustworthy interactions
with your app coming from unknown accounts
or unknown devices.
In the past, we introduced separate APIs
to help with specific problems, like the SafetyNet Attestation
API and Google Play Licensing.
This helps thousands of apps trust devices
and user accounts every day, but the challenge
continues to evolve.
There are increasingly sophisticated forms of abuse
that put your users and your business at risk.
You've also told us that you're concerned
about the complexity of integrating
with multiple APIs and the fear of letting serious abuse
through without even knowing.
So we have unified our most advanced integrity technologies
so that you can protect your apps by calling a single API.
DOM ELLIOTT: Here's what we're doing to help.
The new Play Integrity API helps you
detect risky and untrustworthy interactions with your app.
It gives your backend server signals
so that it can decide whether or not to trust
an interaction with your app.
The API helps you answer three questions.
Is this your genuine binary?
Is this a genuine Play install?
And, is this a genuine Android device?
Once you know there is an issue, you
can decide how to increase the use of friction
to reduce the risk to your app.
We've been working closely with these developers
to test the API, and it's already
being used in production to protective apps and games.
The new API has some key benefits.
It's fully supported by Google Play
with up-to-date documentation, samples, and best practices.
You'll be able to configure the API from your Play console
and get developer support.
The integrity response is small and encrypted.
It packages together multiple integrity signals
into one response, so you don't need
to implement multiple APIs.
This API is also future looking.
It will support new device types and form factors
and is designed to carry future integrity signals.
SOLÉNE MAÍTRE: So how does it work?
The API allows your app server to communicate with Play
servers to determine trust in a way that cannot be interfered
with.
Let's look at the main steps together.
First, the user tries to do something
like signing to your app or join your multiplayer game.
At this moment, your backend server
starts an integrity check with a unique ID,
then your app makes a call to the Play Integrity API.
The Play server has a lot of different signals
to assess whether the device has been compromised
and whether it has passed the certification tests.
Play also verifies the license.
As a result, the Play Integrity API
sends back a sign, an encrypted verdict,
about whether you can trust the device and the binary.
Your app forwards it back to your server,
where you can analyze the verdict
and check that it comes back with the same idea you sent it
with.
If everything is fine, you can let your user move on.
All this happens almost instantaneously,
so your users won't notice a delay.
So this is how the Play Integrity API works.
If you use SafetyNet Attestation API,
the implementation is very similar.
DOM ELLIOTT: Now, some important things
to remember when using the API.
Identify your main concerns.
Do you have a piracy problem, fraudulent traffic, cheating,
or something else?
Measure how big the problem is and consider
what it's costing you, so that you know how much effort
to put in reducing it.
When it comes to integrity issues,
there's no silver bullet, and the Integrity API
isn't intended to be one.
You should use the API as part of an overall security
and anti-abuse strategy.
Make sure you're taking into account
the risk of false positives and any cost
you might be introducing to good users.
Rather than blocking risky traffic,
it's generally better to increase friction
by requiring additional steps or to reduce functionality
to the risky traffic.
Finally, you should keep measuring and evolving.
Listen to your users and stay up to date with Android
and play features and industry anti-abuse best practices.
We're rolling out the Play Integrity
API in the coming months.
Find out more at g.co/play/integrityapi.
We're going to publish an integration guide
for both apps that distribute on Google Play and apps
that distribute elsewhere.
We'll share more information about migrating
from SafetyNet Device Attestation and Play Licensing
to the new API.
Thanks for watching.
We're really excited to launch the API
and to hear your feedback.
[MUSIC PLAYING]