Re: Origin vs Authority; use of HTTPS (draft-nottingham-site-meta-01)

Wow, this draft is scary.  I haven't seen the prior discussion of this
draft, but we should learn from the mistakes of Flash's
crossdomain.xml policy file.  In particular, you should require that
the host-meta file should be served with a specific mime type (ignore
the response if the mime type is wrong.  This protects servers that
let users upload content from having attackers upload a bogus
host-meta file.

Also, if you want this feature to be useful for Web browsers, you
should align the scope of the host-meta file with the notion or origin
(not authority).  Section 4 seems to imply that the scope is
"www.example.com:80" but Section 6 implies the scope is
"https://www.example.com".  In fact, computing the origin of a URL
correctly is more complex than this draft assumes.  For details, see
my origin draft.

That said, I think host-meta would be super useful if specified correctly.

Adam


On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 6:57 AM, Thomas Roessler <tlr@w3.org> wrote:
> Reading draft-nottingham-site-meta-01...
>
>> 4. Discovering host-meta Files
>
>> The metadata for a given authority can be discovered by dereferencing the
>> path /host-meta on the same authority. For example, for an HTTP URI
>> [RFC2616], the following request would obtain metadata for the authority
>> "www.example.com:80";
>
> Editorial nit: That semicolon wants to be a colon.
>
>> GET /host-meta HTTP/1.1
>> Host: www.example.com
>
> It is somewhat unclear what the scope of the host-meta file is, or more
> precisely, how the URI for the host-meta file is derived from the URI of the
> resource that the metadata apply to.
>
> Section 4 seems to suggest that the URI is maybe generated by dereferencing
> the relative URI reference /host-meta using the resource's URI as the base
> URI, but it doesn't say that clearly; the use of "authority" suggests that
> the choice of the protocol is actually up to the implementation.
>
> From the previous apps-discuss thread, it seems like the main use case for
> permitting metadata to leak across schemes (and therefore, typically ports
> -- though ports and schemes are strictly speaking orthogonal) lies with URI
> schemes that do not have a resource retrieval operation readily available,
> e.g., mailto.
>
> On the other hand, I'm extremely wary about anything near HTTP that might
> tear down origin boundaries without a great deal of care.  E.g., a purely
> authority-based approach might permit metadata to leak from the HTTP part of
> a site (where no integrity protection is given) into its HTTPS part (where
> integrity protection and authenticity of data is deemed important), possibly
> permitting attacks against web applications that are ostensibly protected --
> as is alluded to in the security considerations.
>
> The obvious solution to that part of the puzzle is to let the mechanism
> default to the same URI scheme, unless there is a specific convention to the
> contrary.  That should cover any URI schemes for which a safe retrieval
> operation is defined (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP come to mind).
>
> For other URI schemes, one could either punt on this issue completely,
> define a default fall-back to HTTP (or HTTPS, depending on which of the two
> better matches the security properties of the protocol in question), or
> actually say explicitly what's the correct scheme.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> --
> Thomas Roessler, W3C  <tlr@w3.org>
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 10 February 2009 16:59:11 UTC