Re: On the Insecurity of Whitelists and the Future of CSP

On Thu, Sep 8, 2016 at 1:16 PM, Artur Janc <aaj@google.com> wrote:
> An attacker with an XSS can set any cookie they want to make the exfiltrated
> data visible across the whole top-level domain, so they're not bound by
> flags on any existing cookies.

That depends on whether or not we offer ways to restrict cookie APIs.
(I think there's a proposal for that somewhere.)


> I'm not saying that preventing exfiltration is a priori bad or impossible.
> However, it's something that we're nowhere near solving, and even if it's
> solved it will not make cross-site scripting much less of a concern for most
> applications. Compare this to the goal of preventing malicious script
> execution in the first place, which we're close to achieving with nonces +
> trust propagation with 'strict-dynamic' (at least for most classes of XSS
> that we currently see).
>
> If we can improve the situation there (e.g. give developers more powerful
> features to execute trusted scripts while disallowing injected ones) then
> we're simultaneously solving the exfiltration issue because an attacker
> without script execution cannot easily extract the data from the DOM in the
> first place. And on top of it, we're addressing the other current risks of
> XSS, such as persistent access to the compromised origin, and so on. I think
> it's a powerful signal that we should be focusing efforts on that area.

Fair.


-- 
https://annevankesteren.nl/

Received on Thursday, 8 September 2016 11:28:43 UTC