EIP-3074 AUTHCALL and phishing protection?

Happy to hear that EIP-3074 (“AUTHCALL”) is going forward.

The question I have in mind is how EIP-3074 prevents phishing? I looked up some old AUTHCALL examples (likely outdated), and most of them seem to be a normal EIP-712 message.

An example here:

If AUTH/AUTHCALL allows the user to delegate her wallet to any smart contract with a single signed message, isn’t this a large phishing risk? Or am I misunderstanding something here, and there are going to be some security measurements not signing arbitrary AUTH/AUTHCALLs?

  • Currently Ethereum has ~600 wallets as listed on WalletConnect website, there are likely couple of hundreds more
  • Phishing is the largest security problem in the Ethereum ecosystem, where approve(), permit() and Permit2 phishing cause $70M/month losses to Ethereum users, causing more damage than hacks and rug pulls, or any other attack vector
  • Legacy wallet dev teams do not have resources to build transaction simulators or other such security measurements to prevent new phishing vectors
  • EIP-3074 specification does not discuss this problem, does not give any UX guidelines for wallet and Dapp developers, and so on, so it feels there might be a risk here
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Got my answer here - 3074 the messages are impossible to sign with older wallets.

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Yes, it uses a different message prefix. It’s important that wallets are very transparent about this message type because it is a similar security model to lending someone your private key.

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