[whatwg] <meta name="referrer">

[Adam Barth]

On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 4:55 PM, Michal Zalewski <lcamtuf at coredump.cx> wrote:
>> It would be nice if this could be done orthogonally to rel="noreferrer", and
>> in a way that's link-specific instead of global to the whole page; for
>> example, <a rel="originreferrer">, <a rel="alwaysreferrer">.
>
> There is a fairly strong security benefit of policing it on document-
> or even origin-level: it's exceedingly easy to miss an outgoing link
> or a Referer-sending subresource (including <img>, <iframe>, <link
> rel=...>) otherwise.
>
> It's roughly the same reason why we have CSP, even though policing the
> markup is theoretically possible without it.

Yeah, it's really easy to forget to tag a link with noreferrer.  There
have been embarrassing news stories about some popular social
networking sites who missed doing the current redirect hack on a link
or two and got in privacy hot water.

Similarly, it's useful for this feature to apply things besides links,
such as iframes (e.g., advertisements embedded in a social networking
site---see previously mentioned news stories).  I can add this
information to the use cases section if that would be helpful.

Adam