Re: [webauthn] Document privacy considerations of immediate mediation (#2307)

I think the current spec might leave some room for interpretation so I request clarification in text to mitigate a potential privacy leakage. Here is my concern: 

there should be more clarification on the incognito fingerprinting. Timing consideration is predicted to mitigate this attack in the explainer: "To avoid incognito fingerprinting, this response can be delayed by the browser to simulate the browser fetching credential metadata from the system.". Also, There are three scenarios that throws NotAllowedError:

* when there are no locally-available credentials
* when browsed in private mode
* when requests has allowlists

It looks like user agent throws the error with synthetic delay only in private mode. From the text I can conclude this: **if the RP provides an allowlist, the UA is expected to immediately throw an error.** However, a combination of these two might leak incognito fingerprinting:

> allowlist with mediation: 'immediate' -> if error thrown with delay (to simulate browser fetching credential metadata) -> private browsing

Can you please make this clear in privacy section?

-- 
GitHub Notification of comment by toreini
Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/webauthn/issues/2307#issuecomment-3144509489 using your GitHub account


-- 
Sent via github-notify-ml as configured in https://github.com/w3c/github-notify-ml-config

Received on Friday, 1 August 2025 13:00:45 UTC