It's always device attestation - Pokèmon Edition

Keeping this short: for everyone who has been getting error 1001 on the title screen after updating Pokèmon Champions to play the new Regulation on September 8: they added device attestation. You gotta turn that on on your emulator or on your perfectly normal, privacy friendly, phone if you’re on Lineage OS or any other non-Google approved OS.

Because fuck privacy, amirite?

What’s device attestation?

SafetyNet, Google Integrity API, all names for the same thing: a way for apps to ask Google permission before letting you use your phone.

Arguably, a competitive game which is meant to be used in competitive settings (even if tournaments will probably require a console) and needs to make sure you cannot tamper with it is the most reasonable use-case for it, but as always, it fucks with people who are doing nothing wrong because it’s an easy and cheap solution - which people who really want to cheat at competitive tournaments will know how to circumvent.

Error 1001

Nintendo support says it’s a network error, and please change network. You know if you’re on an emulator or on a non-standard device. If you don’t know what these words are, probably not your scenario.

The error started up with no explanation, then was followed by a piece of news titled Our Response to Unauthorized Downloads of Pokèmon Champions.

They only mention that they may restrict access to the relevant users without notice. I - and many of the impacted users wondering what this has to do with them - have downloaded the app from the legitimate release on Google Play Store - so that’s not what this update actually does, but the illusion of security is generally more sought after than security itself.

Solution

The usual ones. I use Lineage4Microg and I had to turn on device registration and attestation in its companion app. Mileage may vary depending on what you’re using, but the end goal is getting that integrity token signed by Google.

This reminded me that it’s been a while since I last checked on whatever the Web Environment Integrity guys are up to to see if they found new ways to ruin the web for everyone.