[whatwg] Dealing with UI redress vulnerabilities inherent to the current web

[Robert O'Callahan]

On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 12:27 PM, Michal Zalewski <lcamtuf at dione.cc> wrote:

> On Fri, 26 Sep 2008, Robert O'Callahan wrote:
>
>  Seems like this will create a really bad user experience. The user
>> scrolling around in the outer document will make IFRAMEs in it mysteriously
>> become enabled or disabled.
>>
>
> Well, to put this in perspective - we are talking about cross-domain
> IFRAMEs only, and only a short security timeout;


The timeout only applies after the "obstruction" is removed, right? Until
then everything is disabled. So as long as the top-left corner of the
IFRAME's viewport is not visible, e.g. because it's scrolled out of view in
the top-level document, the IFRAME must remain disabled.


> we could also quite conceivably make an exception for cases where a frame
> is scrolled into view as a result of the user interacting with the scroll
> bar, as opposed to page scripts (some optimizations of this type are already
> mentioned in the proposal).


Sure, but each such extension add complexity for implementors, authors and
users. Making the disabling happen less often in this way makes it all the
more mysterious when it does happen.

As noted, my greatest concern is having us pick an easy way out that
> essentially delegates all responsibility for compensating for an arguably
> broken design to web applications (as is the case with most of the opt-in
> solutions) - web developers already face a remarkable burden here, and tend
> to fail way too often - or devising a fix that cripples some less obvious
> but common uses (such as gadgets / mashups, or IFRAMEd advertisements).
>

Indeed.

IMHO the basic problem here is allowing IFRAMEs to be cross-origin by
default. That causes many problems, some of which you know well, and others
you probably don't (e.g.
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2008Sep/0112.html ). In fact, in
an ideal world, I think we'd default to same-origin restrictions on
everything --- IFRAMEs, images, scripts, etc --- and use a spec like Access
Controls to let sites opt-in to allowing their resources to be loaded from
specific other origins.

In the real world, we can't do that, but I kinda like option 1 because it
(sort of) lets sites opt into that ideal world. (And I'm pushing for all new
kinds of resource loads, such as fonts and external SVG "resource
documents", to use that approach.)

Rob
-- 
"He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are
healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his
own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all." [Isaiah
53:5-6]
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