- From: Philippe De Ryck <philippe.deryck@cs.kuleuven.be>
- Date: Tue, 02 Aug 2011 08:29:40 +0200
- To: public-html-comments@w3.org
- Cc: Giles Hogben <Giles.Hogben@enisa.europa.eu>, Lieven Desmet <Lieven.Desmet@cs.kuleuven.be>, Thomas Roessler <tlr@w3.org>
The following comment contains detailed information about an issue that was discovered during a recent security analysis of 13 next generation web standards, organized by ENISA (European Network and Information Security Agency), and performed by the DistriNet Research Group (K.U. Leuven, Belgium). The complete report is available at http://www.enisa.europa.eu/html5 (*), and contains information about the process, the discovered vulnerabilities and recommendations towards improving overall security in the studied specifications. Summary --------- The specification of custom scheme/content handlers does not really deal with potential security issues nor does it provide adequate protection towards users. Based on: HTML5, 11 July 2011 Relevant Sections: 6.5.1.2. Custom Scheme and Content Handlers Issue ------- The security implications of the use of custom scheme/content handlers are unclear and underdocumented. The specification does list a number of concerns, but most of them simply describe the concern and delegate fixing the issue to the user agent. Additionally, several issues lack the necessary level of depth (for example, it is unclear why secure URLs should not be sent to a third-party handler, since unprotected HTTPS URLs are publicly accessible anyway). Additionally, no awareness indicators are required, which can be unintuitive towards users. This becomes especially relevant for handlers that were registered a long time ago, and since forgotten about. Recommended Solution ---------------------- Investigate the potential security consequences and formulate concrete ways to address them. Including these in the specification will lead to a uniform and secure implementation by browser vendors. (*) HTML version of the report is available as well: https://distrinet.cs.kuleuven.be/projects/HTML5-security/ -- Philippe De Ryck K.U.Leuven, Dept. of Computer Science Disclaimer: http://www.kuleuven.be/cwis/email_disclaimer.htm
Received on Tuesday, 2 August 2011 09:06:57 UTC