Re: Blocking high-risk non-secure downloads

Here's a very problematic situation I am discussing with the Firebox
people (and filed a bug report): Our application allows folks to
assemble files, pack them into a zip and download the data. Some
combination of certain files, when packed and zipped, seem to create a
situation where Chromium (and Firefox) believe the data to be dangerous.
I guess it's based on the signature. Chromium marks the download as
potentially dangerous but allows the download anyway - Firefox however
downloads the file and zero-truncates it on disk without any warning.
Here's my point: The browser should never be allowed to discard or
corrupt any data without the user's expressed knowledge. It is not
enough to only have a tick-box in settings. Warnings need to be
displayed on any potentially dangerous file. It is not acceptable when
the browser decides by itself whether or not do allow downloads and
doesn't tell the user. Signatures or other detection mechanism can (and
as my case shows, will) deliver false positives and it's creating a
slippery slope that may, at some point, be misused for other reasons. It
is however - perfectly ok to warn the user and let him/her decide for
themselves.

Michaela

On 4/9/19 1:28 PM, Emily Stark wrote:
> Hi webappsec friends,
>
> Over in Chrome land, we've been considering how to drive down
> non-secure downloads, particularly high-risk ones like executables. I
> wanted to see if other browsers would be interested in joining us on
> this adventure.
>
> We want to achieve the right balance between
> compatibility/user-disruption and security improvements, so we will
> likely start by treating certain high-risk downloads initiated from
> secure contexts as active mixed content and block them. We're still
> finalizing our metrics before we can share them publicly, but right
> now it's looking like it will be feasible to block a set of high-risk
> filetypes (executables and archives as determined by the Content-Type
> header or sniffed mime-type). We will likely focus on protecting
> desktop users because Android and Safe Browsing already
> provide protection
> <https://source.android.com/security/reports/Google_Android_Security_2018_Report_Final.pdf>
> against malicious APKs.
>
> We're not planning to focus on non-secure downloads initiated from
> non-secure contexts at the moment, because users at least see the "Not
> Secure" omnibox badge on those pages.
>
> Feedback welcome!
> Thanks,
> Emily

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