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exposing sensitive information in URIs - LC comments on draft-nottingham-http-link-header-07.txt

From: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:23:05 +0100
Message-ID: <4B586349.5050405@gmx.de>
To: Apps Discuss <discuss@apps.ietf.org>, HTTP Working Group <ietf-http-wg@w3.org>
Hi,

finally a security related comment.

During IETF LC for draft-brown-versioning-link-relations we got a 
comment from Eric Rescorla:

"In general this mechanism seems sound but I'm not sure that the 
security considerations are entirely adequate. This mechanism lets you 
learn information about other versions of a resource even if you 
potentially don't have permission to view them directly. Consider a 
limiting case where each version of the resource had a name that 
contained the change set for that resource. E.g.,

http://example.com/versions/filename/_@line_50_+_FOO;@line_60_+_BAR/;

In this case, seeing other parts of the version tree leaks information 
about those versions. I don't think that this is a problem for the 
draft, but it might be useful to mention that this feature has 
implications for name construction."

I assume this is a concern that applies to the Link header in general.

Best regards, Julian
Received on Thursday, 21 January 2010 14:23:44 UTC

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