Ethereum Foundation funds Freedom of the Press to develop WEBCAT, a tool for verifiable web frontends

The Ethereum Foundation’s Ecosystem Support Program has awarded a grant to the Freedom of the Press Foundation to build WEBCAT, a project focused on making web application frontends verifiable and censorship-resistant. The tool is designed to let users confirm that the code running in their browser is actually the code developers intended to ship. What WEBCAT actually does The project focuses on in-browser code verification. In English: it gives your browser a way to check that the JavaScript, HTML, and other code being served to you matches what the developers published. If someone, whether a malicious actor, a compromised server, or even a coerced hosting provider, swaps out the real frontend for a poisoned version, WEBCAT would flag it. This matters enormously for Ethereum wallets and dApps, where a compromised frontend can drain funds without ever touching the smart contract layer. Some of the most damaging crypto exploits in recent years haven’t been smart contract hacks at all. They’ve been frontend attacks, DNS hijacks, and supply chain compromises that served users malicious interfaces while the underlying protocols remained perfectly intact. The project maintains public do...