Re: In Defense of HTML5

[Jeffrey Walton <noloader () gmail com>]

On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 7:05 PM, Michal Zalewski <lcamtuf () coredump cx> wrote:
> > WebSockets are a concern to me. An attacker almost always wants to
> > egress data (otherwise, what's the point?), so WebSockets are an
> > addition to the attacker's war chest. In addition, WebSockets make it
> > really convenient to setup reverse proxies (emphasize convenient).
>
> Marginally so... there is a lot of web apps that handle low-latency,
> interactive streaming in a variety of situations, and they don't need
> WS for that.
>
> WS is slightly more convenient where supported, indeed, but it doesn't
> really enable anything that wasn't perfectly possible (and done)
> before.
So, I think what it boils down to (for me): under pre-HTML5, we could
create policies and perform code reviews that enforced the policy.
There were no built-in mechanisms, and code was banned as required.

Under HTML5, the egress point is built into the protocol, and we can't
remove it. Code will still be banned. The code is likely going to be
more terse (since the protocol offers native support) and possibly
harder to identify. Plus, its going to be portable so any malicious or
questionable code is going to run everywhere.

Jeff
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