- From: Deian Stefan <deian@cs.stanford.edu>
- Date: Sun, 08 Feb 2015 23:17:51 -0800
- To: Devdatta Akhawe <dev.akhawe@gmail.com>
- Cc: Martin Thomson <martin.thomson@gmail.com>, Brad Hill <hillbrad@gmail.com>, Jeffrey Yasskin <jyasskin@google.com>, Mike West <mkwst@google.com>, Wendy Seltzer <wseltzer@w3.org>, David Ross <drx@google.com>, Dan Veditz <dveditz@mozilla.com>, Mounir Lamouri <mlamouri@google.com>, David Baron <dbaron@dbaron.org>, Anne van Kesteren <annevk@annevk.nl>, "public-webappsec\@w3.org" <public-webappsec@w3.org>
Devdatta Akhawe <dev.akhawe@gmail.com> writes: > I think asking browsers to implement any distributed information flow > system is a big ask and to make it a deliverable for this WG an even > bigger ask. I think creating confined containers (workers or iframes) > that then allow some JS script to create simple information flow based > policies is a simpler first step and a more concrete deliverable. Note > that this in itself is not easy and it is not clear it can even be > done---see Martin's notes about side-channels. Sorry, but "confined containers (workers or iframes) that ... allow some JS script to create simple information flow based policies" is essentially what the goal of the COWL spec is. I agree that side channels are a concern if you consider malicious code, but confining code that is not malicious is still useful. And COWL's covert-channel assumption is the same as that of the existing CSP directives that deal with exfiltration. I don't think we need to eliminate covert channels to improve security. Cheers, Deian
Received on Monday, 9 February 2015 07:18:18 UTC