On Mon, Sep 14, 2015 at 10:08 AM, Rigo Wenning <rigo@w3.org> wrote: > The same argumentation has already be used during the rechartering of the > WebCrypto Group. The privacy argument used by people from one of the > largest origins is funny at best. If I use my token with A and I use my > token with B, A and B have to communicate to find out that I used them both. > Speaking as someone who attended WebCrypto Next Steps, the common theme to me was actually a fundamental incompatibility between PKCS#11 APIs and how web browsers operate. Many talks alluded to some sort of "bridge" or "gateway" or "missing puzzle piece" to connect the Web to PKCS#11 hardware tokens. Unfortunately there were no concrete proposals from either a technical or UX perspective. It was mostly a dream from all of the vendors, realized in slightly different vague handwavy visions, of how someone could swoop in and magically solve this problem for everyone. Clearly dreams without actual technical proposals didn't go anywhere. The reality is the SOP is the foundational security principle of the web. Period. Introducing SOP violations is a great way to ensure browser vendors don't adopt proposals. Going back to your original point though, what you're describing is of course extremely commonplace on the web. Web sites often leverage multiple advertising and analytics networks, so "A and B communicating" (perhaps vicariously via ad or analytic network C) is so exceedingly commonplace I'm not sure what you're even suggesting. This already happens practically everywhere all the time, to many commonly shared third parties who very much want stable identifiers to link users. There are of course ample other signals by which ad and analytics networks can track people with (IP addresses and "supercookies" certainly come to mind), but by brushing it off, you're actually suggesting that cryptographic traceability should be built into the fundamental cryptographic architecture of the Web. This is a slippery slope argument, i.e. things are bad, so why not make them worse? There's no going back from that, short of throwing it all away (as what is likely to happen to the <keygen> tag soon) and starting over from scratch (ala FIDO). -- Tony Arcieri
Received on Tuesday, 15 September 2015 20:15:36 UTC