Re: CORS performance

On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 7:15 AM, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@hsivonen.fi> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 9:31 PM, Brad Hill <hillbrad@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I think it is at least worth discussing the relative merits of using a
>> resource published under /.well-known for such use cases, vs. sending
>> "pinned" headers with every single resource.
>
> FWIW, when CORS was designed, the Flash crossdomain.xml design (which
> uses a well-known URL though not under /.well-known) already existed
> and CORS deliberately opted for a different design.
>
> It's been a while, so I don't recall what the reasons against adopting
> crossdomain.xml or something very similar to it were, but considering
> that the crossdomain.xml design was knowingly rejected, it's probably
> worthwhile to pay attention to why.

A lot websites accidentally enabled cross-origin requests with
cookies. Not realizing that that enabled attackers to make requests
that had side-effects as well as read personal user data without user
permission.

In short, it was very easy to misconfigure a server, and people did.

This is why I would feel dramatically more comfortable if we only
enabled server-wide opt-in for credential-less requests. Those are
many orders of magnitude easier to make secure.

/ Jonas

Received on Monday, 23 February 2015 18:56:16 UTC