Re: Review of 22 Jan editor's draft

Many thanks for your comments! Some inline responses below with questions  
for you and the rest of the WG...


On Wed, 23 Jan 2008 19:21:10 +0100, Thomas Roessler <tlr@w3.org> wrote:
> My notes about last night's editor's draft...
>
> - The abstract is somewhat hard to understand.

I reworded it.


> - Introduction: I find much of the introduction chapter somewhat
>   disorganized.  I'd like the document to start out by saying rather
>   precisely what's going on, along these lines:

Thanks, I integrated large chunks of the suggested text.


> - Going on in the current introduction text, the specification
>   doesn't define an access control policy, but an access control
>   policy framework.  The use cases and requirements should move up
>   into the introduction, or at least close to it.

The introduction points to the use cases and requirements. I don't think  
they should go all the way up personally.


>   The Note about
>   form.submit() belongs somewhere into the design FAQ or security
>   considerations.

It was already in the FAQ so I removed the note.


>   The access control policy is *not* "defined in
>   the resource" (except for XML documents).

Reworded this somewhat.


>  "The client is trusted"
>   is an awfully broad statement.  The text "The resource would look at
>   follows" is followed by a snippet from an HTTP transaction.

Fixed, I think.


> - Conformance criteria: The document says awfully little in terms of
>   "a specification that wants to use this framework needs to do the
>   following things", even though section 2 claims so.

The specification has various requirements on hosting specifications. I  
made this more clear by introducing the term "hosting specification".


> - "User agents MAY optimize..." is besides the point.  Instead: "User
>   agents MAY employ any algorithm to implement this specification
>   that leads to the exact same results as the algorithms included in
>   this specification."

Fixed.


> - There's a lot of very detailed stuff about white space separated
>   lists going on in section 2; I'd rather see this dropped, and
>   grammars and useful language used closer to the parsing steps.

I rather not try to change this at this point at the risk of introducing  
errors.


> - The security considerations should ideally be a discussion of
>   security effects, i.e., "can trigger GET, and here's why this is
>   harmless"; "we care about POST, because".  Instead, there's a lot
>   of normative material clumped together in this section that would
>   better go to the places where actual processing is described.

I don't really see how. The actual security implications of the processing  
defined by this specification is defined in the processing sections  
already.


> - "Authors sharing content with domains that are on shared hosting
>   environments" rather misses the point by just talking about ports:
>   Namely, that -- because we assume that the protocol / technology
>   that hosts the access-control framework uses a same-origin policy
>   -- authorizations can only be given with a granularity of origins.
>   Anything below that is futile.

Origin includes ports (and schemes).


> - "evil" applications don't really have a place here, maybe talk
>   about an attacker.  "Authors SHOULD ensure that GET ..." is
>   re-stating HTTP; that should be rephrased as an admnishment to
>   adhere to the HTTP spec's semantics.

Fixed.


> - "Authors are encouraged to check the Referer-Root HTTP header" --
>   this should be somewhere in the processing model, not a side
>   remark in the security considerations.  It *is* an additional
>   policy enforcement point, and should be called out clearly.

The processing model is not for authors.


> - The design seems a bit inconsistent about IDNs: The syntax permits
>   them, but HTTP doesn'tl the latter is called out in a note.  I'd
>   rather see that done consistently.  When speaking about IDNs, it
>   might be useful to adapt the A-label and U-label terminology from
>   this I-D:
>  http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-klensin-idnabis-issues-05

Do you have any concrete suggestions?


> - "If the scheme omitted it will match" is normative language, but
>   looks as though it's formatted as a note.  Or maybe I'm just
>   confused about the formatting.  Oh, and the grammar is wrong.

That was actually an informative statement, but I removed it as it was  
indeed confusing.


> - The Access-Control production continues to use comma-separated
>   method identifiers.  Also, shouldn't there be at least one method
>   given?

This was fixed some time ago. If "method" is present a method must be  
given. Otherwise not.


> - "In case resources on a domain are not in control..." mixes a use
>   case and processing rules into the middle of a syntax description,
>   and is generally quite a mess. Please make a pass through the
>   document to give it a useful structure.
>
> - '"allow rules" can be used to allow read access ...' sounds like a
>   remnant from the old voice browser spec.  At this point, I believe
>   tha the syntax description should limit itself to describing a
>   (multivalued) mapping from authorized origins to methods, with the
>   specific exception that GET is used to generically determine
>   access to the data returned, no matte what method was used to
>   retrieve these data.
>  (Incidentally, that's a point that is going to confuse policy
>   authors without end.  Maybe we need something different here.)

Both fixed.


> - '"method" rule' is oddly phrased.

I couldn't figure out where this was referring to.


> - 4.4 says what the syntax of the Referer-Root header is.  It would
>   be useful to point out here when that header is transmitted.  In
>   particular, "in case the Referer header is not included" makes it
>   sound as though user agents had a choice between these headers.

Fixed.


> - 5.1, cross-site access request.  The English grammar of the first
>   paragraph needs improvement.

Fixed, hopefully.


> - The processing model confuses user agent behavior and input that
>   is given to user agent behavior to be specified elsewhere.  That
>   doesn't make things particularly easy to read.

Tried to clarify things.


> - "The referrer root URI ..." assumes an HTTP-like URI syntax.
>   That's not necessarily present everywhere.  Needs clean-up!

I'm not sure what this comment is referring to. As far as I can tell  
referer root URI is defined as it should be.


> - Much of the processing model is phrased in terms of forward
>   references to generic steps.  I find this pseudo-code like
>   configuration style extremely hard to read, and suspect that it'll
>   make useful security review more difficult than necessary.

Generic steps were before the actual processing model at some point, but a  
set of commenters felt that forward referencing would be better. I'm not  
inclined to revert this change.


> - Why is the authorization request cache mandatory?

Is there a good reason to make it optional?


> - The authorization request cache isn't actually an authorization
>   request cache, but an authorization decision cache.  The current
>   name is confusing at least.

I think the current name is consistent with "authorization request" and I  
rather keep it that way.


> - There is no discussion as to how Vary or Cache-control headers on
>   HTTP responses that were received are handled.  How do these
>   interact with the separate caching model specified here

OPTIONS is not cached so those headers are not relevant.


> - Why does the specification follow redirects upon OPTIONS?  If I
>   read RFC 2616 correctly, then redirects for HTTP methods other
>   than GET and HEAD shouldn't happen without user intervention.

I suppose I could remove "transparent". What do other people think?


>   The current specification material around redirects looks like
>   it's pseudo-code ripped out of context; this needs more work to be
>   comprehensible, and a clear explanation what the expectations are
>   for a hosting specification.  Either the processing model or the
>   security considerations should explain very clearly what tradeoffs
>   a hosting specification faces in specifying any behavior
>   concerning redirects.

What do you have in mind?


> - The access control check algorithm goes to an excrutiating level
>   of detail, while confusing the reader.  It is probably much easier
>   to write up how to parse the various headers into the mapping from
>   origins to methods, and how to deal with that.

At least for me, it wasn't.


> - Once more, we have forward references to generic material,
>   undeclared variables used to pass around information between
>   different sections, and a general lack of readability.  For
>   example, temp method list isn't temporary, not introduced before
>   its first appearance, and only specified in the "allow list check"
>   section.

"temp method list" is introduced well in advance.


> - "parse ... using a streaming XML parser" -- I'm pretty sure you
>   don't mean to prescribe use of a streaming XML parser, but rather
>   want to allow use of one, right?

I do mean to prescribe the use of an XML parser. Otherwise results would  
be inconsistent with different clients picking different strategies.


> - In the allow list check, item 3 of the algorithm looks like it's
>   wrong.  This actually prunes the list of methods that are added to
>   the temp method list depending on the current request's method.

I don't think the specification is wrong here. Could you elaborate?


>   Also, this item has bad grammar.

Is this fixed by the changes from Mike?


> - Having atomic steps like "set the allow access flag to true"
>   (point 5) might be a useful technique in programming.  In English
>   text, it doesn't actually help understand the algorithm.

The algorithm requires careful reading, yes.


> - Starting at item 10 of the access item check algorithm, we go into
>   defining how domain names are parsed and compared.  That can be
>   said in much shorter terms by referring to terms from the relevant
>   specs. Roughly: Origin and item are converted to ASCII.  They are
>   compared string-insensitively, with the additional property that
>   the leftmost label of item might be "*", and can match an
>   arbitrary number of labels.  (Or something like this.)

I rather not make changes unless mistakes are identified at the risk of  
introducing errors.


> - The requirements tend to confuse authentication and authorization.
>   E.g., under 1, you're really talking about deployments that base
>   their authorization decisions exclusively on somebody being on the
>   right side of a firewall.

The requirements recently got changed. Is this still an issue?


> - In the part that talks about cross-site POST, it might be useful
>   to speak of UPNP as a possible target.

I'm not sure what you mean here.


> - "Should not fail to properly enforce security policy..." sounds
>   like a copy of requirement 13 later on.

Requirement 13 is reworded.


> - I continue to disagree with requirement 3, "must be deployable to
>   existing..."; this is highly dependent on the cricumstances of a
>   particular deployment.  I suggest saying clearly what is really
>   meant.  E.g., what abilities should be sufficient in order to
>   deploy the thing -- like, ability to write to XML files.

I'm not sure I understand.


> - requirement 4 (more "easily deploy" that I actually disagree with)
>   only holds for XML content.  Please qualify this requirement.

Requirement 4 is actually not about XML content specifically.


> - req 6 could use some elaboration. The current text could be
>   misread to say that the authorized party should be identified with
>   resource-level granularity, which we know is a bad idea.

This was reworded.


> - req 9 is somewhere between an implementation requirement and a use
>   case.  Strikes me as somewhat wierdly phrased..

This was reworded as well.


> - req 10 effectively says "APIs for cross-site data access
>   shouldn't differ from these for same-origin data access"; I'd
>   suggest changing to that

I changed this.


> - req 12 is badly worded.  I suspect it means "shouldn't break
>   HTTP".  If there's more to it, please express that more clearly.

Jonas?


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
<http://www.opera.com/>

Received on Sunday, 27 January 2008 14:34:53 UTC