Re: Accountability in AC4CSR

On Wednesday 2008-02-06 22:05 +0000, Close, Tyler J. wrote:
> One of the primary purposes of access control is correctly
> assigning accountability for actions. I think the current AC4CSR
> proposal creates subtle and perhaps unexpected consequences for an
> application's ability to correctly assign accountability.

To me, the most important use case for being able to do cross-site
XMLHttpRequest is the ability to get to *public* resources.  For
example, being able to do things like the Flickr API on the client,
without having to trust the API enough to let it inject script into
your page.  This is already possible with things like the basic (map
display) part of the Google Maps API only because there aren't
cross-site restrictions on image loading (although the Google Maps
API doesn't actually work that way, presumably because it gives
Google more flexibility to change the servers).  I think it's
extremely important that we ship something that allows this (i.e.,
sites to relax the default cross-domain restrictions for some
resources) in Firefox 3.

In what cases is accountability for actions needed for such
fully-public resources?

-David

-- 
L. David Baron                                 http://dbaron.org/
Mozilla Corporation                       http://www.mozilla.com/

Received on Wednesday, 6 February 2008 22:31:21 UTC