<div class="gmail_quote">Most companies that have such policies enforce them with software that encrypts your home directory (or entire hard drive). Since most (all?) browsers store such data within a users home directory, that should be sufficient for the specific case you're mentioning. (Well, except for expiration.) Note that home directory encryption is easy and free on some Linux distros and Mac OS. (I don't know either way about Windows.)</div>
<div class="gmail_quote"><br></div><div class="gmail_quote">To be honest, if someone can get at _any_ of your browser data (LocalStorage included) you have a pretty major problem. So tacking something onto other storage APIs doesn't really make that much sense. If someone can get at even just your cookies, they can probably do a lot of damage.</div>
<div class="gmail_quote"><br></div><div class="gmail_quote">What are the use cases around expiration of data?</div><div class="gmail_quote"><br></div><div class="gmail_quote">Lastly, we really should not be creating new APIs that are synchronous that involve multiple top level windows (like LocalStorage and this API you're proposing). It makes it very difficult to achieve isolation and parallelism between multiple sites.</div>
<div class="gmail_quote"><br></div><div class="gmail_quote">J</div><div class="gmail_quote"><br></div><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 7:55 PM, Nicholas Zakas <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:nzakas@yahoo-inc.com">nzakas@yahoo-inc.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial">Hi everyone,</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial">In attempting to use localStorage at work, we ran into some
major security issues. Primary among those are the guidelines we have in place
regarding personalized user data. The short story is that personalized data
cannot be stored on disk unless it’s encrypted using a company-validated
encryption mechanism and key. So if we actually wanted to use localStorage, we’d
be forced to encrypt each value as it was being written and then decrypt each
value being read. Because of this tediousness, we opted not to use it. </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial">Another major issue also relates to the persistence of the
data in localStorage. Whereas cookies allow you to specify a time at which the
data will be removed, localStorage is there more or less forever.</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial">It seems like any company that takes the security of its
data seriously would run into the same issues, and rather than forcing every
company to implement their own version of the same approach, a common native
approach would be incredibly useful.</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial">With these problems in mind, and talking with a few other
interested parties, I came up with a draft proposal for a client-side data
storage mechanism that automatically handles encryption, decryption, and data
expiration. I’d love to hear what people think:</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial"><a href="http://www.nczonline.net/blog/securestore-proposal/" target="_blank">http://www.nczonline.net/blog/securestore-proposal/</a></span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial">-Nicholas</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial">______________________________________________</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial">Commander Lock: "Damnit Morpheus, not everyone believes
what you believe!"</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial">Morpheus: "My beliefs do not require them to."</span></font></p>
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