Re: My logfile of potential TPE changes and features to be put at risk

> On Sep 22, 2016, at 20:04 , Roy T. Fielding <fielding@gbiv.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Sep 22, 2016, at 4:09 AM, Matthias Schunter (Intel Corporation) <mts-std@schunter.org> wrote:
>> 
>> (Editorial) Changes to TPE
>> - Change fingerprinting section and extend it to a privacy and security
>> section
> 
> The entire spec is about privacy and security.  We would have to narrow
> that quite a bit, such as "privacy bits specific to the TPE protocol"
> or some such.

I think we need to do the security and privacy review; for example, exceptions are a new state-recording mechanism.  DNT headers add to the fingerprinting surface. Contacting a site to find its well-known resource means, well, you’ve contacted it. Could a WKR be malformed to cause security risks?  And so on.

> 
>> - Change definition of "enabled" to also include exceptions: Once you
>> recorded an exception, you implicitly enabled the feature.
> 
> That would not be editorial because the term is used in normative requirements.
> In any case, it isn't necessary: read the last two paragraphs of
> 
>  https://www.w3.org/TR/tracking-dnt/#determining

OK.  But we have a bug; we currently have text that says the header is only sent when DNT is enabled, but later we learn that a site can register an exception even when it’s not, which will cause a DNT header to be sent when applicable, even though the general preference is not enabled.  That’s an editorial bug (the statement that it’s only sent when enabled claims to be a statement of fact, not a requirement).


David Singer
Manager, Software Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Friday, 23 September 2016 09:01:18 UTC