[nfc] Charter: Impossible requirement about user expectations.

jyasskin has just created a new issue for https://github.com/w3c/nfc:

== Charter: Impossible requirement about user expectations. ==
http://w3c.github.io/nfc/charter/index.html#scope says:

> answering “yes” to a security question must not enable a page to 
overwrite a writable tag in a way the user did not expect. Nor can it 
mean that a website can initiate a P2P communication with an NFC 
device which can have effects that the user did not intend. 

If the user allows an untrustworthy page to write to a tag, the page 
can write whatever it wants. To try to achieve the requirement here, 
we could imagine the UA knowing the format of some tags, and echoing 
to the user what the page asked to write, but even then, the user 
might have drawn an image, and the page could have steganographically 
hidden some extra information that the user won't see in the 
confirmation dialog. And we probably don't want to require that UAs 
understand the format of every tag or peer we let pages interact with.

I think it makes sense to charter the WG to explore permission systems
 that minimize the fraction of users who are surprised by pages being 
allowed to interact with NFC devices, but I don't think absolutes are 
achievable here.

See https://github.com/w3c/nfc/issues/79

Received on Wednesday, 18 February 2015 21:47:33 UTC