Network Working Group J. Hodges
Internet-Draft PayPal
Intended status: Standards Track Jul 2012
Expires: January 2, 2013
Web Security Framework: Problem Statement and Requirements
draft-hodges-websec-framework-reqs-02
Abstract
Web-based malware and attacks are proliferating rapidly on the
Internet. New web security mechanisms are also rapidly growing in
number, although in an incoherent fashion. This document provides a
brief overview of the present situation and the various seemingly
piece-wise approaches being taken to mitigate the threats. It then
provides an overview of requirements as presently being expressed by
the community in various online and face-to-face discussions.
Status of this Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
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Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on January 2, 2013.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2012 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
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include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
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the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
described in the Simplified BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.1. Where to Discuss This Draft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2. Document Conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3. Overall Constraints . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4. Overall Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
5. Attacks and Threats to Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
5.1. Attacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
5.2. Threats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
6. Use Cases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
7. Detailed Functional Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
8. Extant Policies to Coalesce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
9. Example Concrete Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
10. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
11. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
12. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
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1. Introduction
Over the past few years, we have seen a proliferation of AJAX-based
web applications (AJAX being shorthand for asynchronous JavaScript
and XML), as well as Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), based on so-
called Web 2.0 technologies. These applications bring both luscious
eye-candy and convenient functionality--e.g. social networking--to
their users, making them quite compelling. At the same time, we are
seeing an increase in attacks against these applications and their
underlying technologies [1]. The latter include (but aren't limited
to) Cross-Site-Request Forgery (CSRF) -based attacks [2], content-
sniffing cross-site-scripting (XSS) attacks [3], attacks against
browsers supporting anti-XSS policies [4], clickjacking attacks [5],
malvertising attacks [6], as well as man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks
against "secure" (e.g. Transport Layer Security (TLS/SSL)-based [7])
web sites along with distribution of the tools to carry out such
attacks (e.g. sslstrip) [8].
During the same time period we have also witnessed the introduction
of new web security indicators, techniques, and policy communication
mechanisms sprinkled throughout the various layers of the Web and
HTTP. We have a new cookie security flag called HTTPOnly [9]. We
have the anti-clickjacking X-Frame-Options HTTP header [10], the
Strict-Transport-Security HTTP header [11], anti-CSRF headers (e.g.
Origin) [12], an anti-sniffing header (X-Content-Type-Options:
nosniff) [13], various approaches to content restrictions [14] [15]
and notably Mozilla Content Security Policy (CSP; conveyed via a HTTP
header) [16], the W3C's Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS; also
conveyed via a HTTP header) [17], as well as RIA security controls
such as the crossdomain.xml file used to express a site's Adobe Flash
security policy [18]. There's also the Application Boundaries
Enforcer (ABE) [19], included as a part of NoScript [20], a popular
Mozilla Firefox security extension. Sites can express their ABE
rule-set at a well-known web address for downloading by individual
clients [21], similarly to Flash's crossdomain.xml. Amidst this
haphazard collage of new security mechanisms at least one browser
vendor has even devised a new HTTP header that disables one of their
newly created security features: witness the X-XSS-Protection header
that disables the new anti-XSS features [22] in Microsoft's Internet
Explorer 8 (IE8).
Additionally, there are various proposals aimed at addressing other
facets of inherent web vulnerabilities, for example: JavaScript
postMessage-based mashup communications [23], hypertext isolation
techniques [24], and service security policies advertised via the
Domain Name System (DNS) [25]. Going even further, there are efforts
to redesign web browser architectures [26], of which Google Chrome
and IE8 are deployed examples. An even more radical approach is
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exhibited in the Gazelle Web Browser [27], which features a browser
kernel embodied in a multi-principal OS construction providing cross-
principal protection and fair sharing of all system resources.
Not to be overlooked is the fact that even though there is a plethora
of "standard" browser security features--e.g. the Same Origin Policy
(SOP), network-related restrictions, rules for third-party cookies,
content-handling mechanisms, etc. [28]--they are not implemented
uniformly in today's various popular browsers and RIA frameworks
[29]. This makes life even harder for web site administrators in
that allowances must be made in site security posture and approaches
in consideration of which browser a user may be wielding at any
particular time.
Although industry and researchers collectively are aware of all the
above issues, we observe that the responses to date have been issue-
specific and uncoordinated. What we are ending up with looks perhaps
similar to Frankenstein's monster [30]--a design with noble intents
but whose final execution is an almost-random amalgamation of parts
that do not work well together. It can even cause destruction on its
own [31].
Thus, the goal of this document is to define the requirements for a
common framework expressing security constraints on HTTP
interactions. Functionally, this framework should be general enough
that it can be used to unite the various individual solutions above,
and specific enough that it can address vulnerabilities not addressed
by current solutions, and guide the development of future mechanisms.
Overall, such a framework would provide web site administrators the
tools for managing, in a least privilege [33] manner, the overall
security characteristics of their web site/applications when realized
in the context of user agents.
1.1. Where to Discuss This Draft
Please disscuss this draft on the websec@ietf.org mailing list
[WebSec].
2. Document Conventions
Note: ..is a note to the reader. These are points that should be
expressly kept in mind and/or considered.
[[XXXn: Some of the more major known issues are marked like this
(where "n" in "XXXn" is a number). --JeffH]]
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[[TODOn: Things to fix (where "n" in "TODOn" is a number). --JeffH]]
We will also be making use of the WebSec WG issue tracker, so use of
the above two issue & TODO marks will evolve accordingly.
3. Overall Constraints
Regardless of the overall approaches chosen for conveying site
security policies, we believe that to be deployed at Internet-scale,
and to be as widely usable as possible for both novice and expert
alike, the overall solution approach will need to address these three
points of tension:
Granularity:
There has been much debate during the discussion of some policy
mechanisms (e.g. CSP) as to how fine-grained such mechanisms
should be. The argument against fine-grained mechanisms is
that site administrators will cause themselves pain by
instantiating policies that do not yield the intended results.
E.g. simply copying the expressed policies of a similar site.
The claim is that this would occur for various reasons stemming
from the mechanisms' complexity [34].
Configurability:
Not infrequently, the complexity of underlying facilities, e.g.
in server software, is not well-packaged and thus
administrators are obliged to learn more about the intricacies
of these systems than otherwise might be necessary. This is
sometimes used as an argument for "dumbing down" the
capabilities of policy expression mechanisms [34].
Usability:
Research shows that when security warnings are displayed, users
are often given too much information as well as being allowed
to relatively easily bypass the warnings and continue with
their potentially compromising activity [35] [36] [37] [38]
[39]. Thus users have become trained to "click through"
security notifications "in order to get work done", though not
infrequently rendering themselves insecure and perhaps
compromised [40].
In the next section we discuss various high-level requirements
derived with the guidance of the latter tension points.
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4. Overall Requirements
1. Policy conveyance:
in-band:
We believe that a regime based on HTTP header(s) is
appropriate. However we must devise a generalized,
extensible HTTP security header(s) such that the on-going
"bloat" of the number of disjoint HTTP security headers is
mitigated and there is a documented framework that we can
leverage as new approaches and/or threats emerge.
Note: The distinction between in-band and out-of-band
signaling is difficult to characterize because some
seemingly out-of-band mechanisms rely on the same
protocols (HTTP/HTTPS) and infrastructure
(transparent proxy servers) as the protocols they
ostensibly protect.
It may be reasonable to devise a small set of headers to
convey different classes of policies, e.g. web application
content policies versus web application network
capabilities policies.
out-of-band:
This policy communication mechanism must be secure and
should have two facets, one for communicating securely out-
of-band of the HTTP protocol to allow for secure client
policy store bootstrapping. potential approaches are
factory-installed web browser configuration, site security
policy download a la Flash's crossdomain.xml and Maone's
ABE for Web Authors [21], and DNS-based policy
advertisement leveraging the security of DNS Security
(DNSSEC) [32].
2. Granularity:
In terms of granularity, vast arrays of stand-alone blog,
wiki, hosted web account, and other "simple" web sites could
ostensibly benefit from relatively simple, pre-determined
policies. However, complex sites--e.g. payment, ecommerce,
software-as-a-service, mashup sites, etc.--often differ in
various ways, as well as being inherently complex
implementation-wise. One-size-fits-all policies will
generally not work well for them. Thus, we believe that to be
effective for a broad array of web site and application types,
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the policy expression mechanism must fundamentally facilitate
fine-grained control. For example, CSP offers such control.
In order to address the less complex needs of the more simple
classes of web sites, the policy expression mechanism could
have a "macro"-like feature enabling "canned policy profiles".
Or, the configuration facilities of various components of the
web infrastructure can be enhanced to provide an appropriately
simple veneer over the complexity.
3. Configurability:
With respect to configurability, development effort should be
applied to creating easy-to-use administrative interfaces
addressing the simple cases, like those mentioned above, while
providing advanced administrators the tools to craft and
manage fine-grained multi-faceted policies. Thus more casual
or novice administrators can be aided in readily choosing, or
be provided with, safe default policies while other classes of
sites have the tools to craft the detailed policies they
require. Examples of such an approach are Microsoft's
"Packaging Wizard" [41] that easily auto-generates a quite
complicated service deployment descriptor on behalf of less
experienced administrators, and Firefox's simple Preferences
dialog [42] as compared to its detailed about:config
configuration editor page [43]. In both cases, simple usage
by inexperienced users is anticipated and provided for on one
hand, while complex tuning of the myriad underlying
preferences is provided for on the other.
4. Usability:
Much has been learned over the last few years about what does
and does not work with respect to security indicators in web
browsers and web pages, as noted above, these lessons should
be applied to the security indicators rendered by new proposed
security mechanisms. We believe that in cases of user agents
venturing into insecure situations, their response should be
to fail the connections by default without user recourse,
rather than displaying warnings along with bypass mechanisms,
as is current practice. For example, the Strict Transport
Security specification
[I-D.draft-ietf-websec-strict-transport-sec-11] suggests the
former hard-fail behavior.
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5. Attacks and Threats to Address
This section enumerates various attacks and threats that ought to be
mitigated by a web security policy framework. In terms of defining
threats in contrast to attacks, Lucas supplied this:
<"Re: More on XSS mitigation (was Re: XSS mitigation in browsers)"
(Lucas Adamski). http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/
public-web-security/2011Jan/0089.html>
"... There's a fundamental question about whether we should be
looking at these problems from an attack vs threat standpoint. An
attack is XSS [or CSRF, or Response Splitting, etc.]. A threat is
that an attacker could compromise a site via content injection to
trick the user to disclosing confidential information (by
injecting a plugin or CSS to steal data or fool the user into
sending their password to the attacker's site). ..."
5.1. Attacks
The below is an enumeration of attacks which are desirable to
mitigate via a web application security framework (see [WASC-THREAT]
for a definition and taxonomy of attacks):
1. cross-site-scripting (XSS) [2] [WASC-THREAT]
2. Man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks against "secure" (e.g.
Transport Layer Security (TLS/SSL)-based [7] [8] [WASC-THREAT])
web sites. For example, be able to subsume the HSTS header [11].
3. User Interface Redressing [UIRedress], aka Clickjacking
[Clickjacking].
4. Cross-Site-Request Forgery (CSRF) [3] [WASC-THREAT] (?)
5. Response Splitting [WASC-THREAT]
6. more (ie eg from [WASC-THREAT] ?) ?
5.2. Threats
Via the attacks above, an attacker can..
1. Obtain a victim's confidential web application credentials (e.g.,
via cookie theft), and use the credentials to impersonate the
victim and enter into transactions, often with the aim of
monetizing the transaction results to the attacker's benefit.
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2. Insert themselves as a Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) between victim
and various services, thus is able to instigate, control,
intercept, and attempt to monetize various transactions and
interactions with web applications, to the benefit of the
attacker.
3. Enumerate various user agent information stores, e.g. browser
history, facilitating views of the otherwise confidential habits
of the victim. This information could possibly be used in
various offline attacks against the victim directly. E.g.:
blackmail, denial of services, law enforcement actions, etc.
4. Use gathered information and credentials to construct and present
a falsified persona of the victim (e.g. for character
assassination).
There is a risk of exfiltration of otherwise confidential victim
information with all the threats listed above.
6. Use Cases
This section outlines various concrete use cases. Where applicable,
source email messages are cited.
1. I'm a web application site administrator. My web app includes
static user-supplied content (e.g. submitted from user agents via
HTML FORM + HTTP POST), but either my developers don't properly
sanitize user-supplied content in all cases or/and content
injection vulnerabilities exist or materialize (for various
reasons).
This leaves my web app vulnerable to cross-site scripting. I
wish I could set overall web app-wide policies that prevent user-
supplied content from injecting malicious content (e.g.
JavaScript) into my web app.
2. I'm a web application site administrator. My web application is
intended, and configured, to be uniformly served over HTTPS, but
my developers mistakenly keep including content via insecure
channels (e.g. via insecure HTTP; resulting in so-called "mixed
content").
I wish I could set a policy for my web app that prevents user
agents from loading content insecurely even if my web app is
otherwise telling them to do so.
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3. I'm a web application site administrator. My site has a policy
that we can only include content from certain trusted providers
(e.g., our CDN, Amazon S3), but my developers keep adding
dependencies on origins I don't trust. I wish I could set a
policy for my site that prevents my web app from accidentally
loading resources outside my whitelist.
4. I'm a web application site administrator. I want to ensure that
my web app is never framed by other web apps.
5. I'm a developer of a web application which will be included (i.e.
framed) by third parties within their own web apps. I would like
to ensure that my web app directs user agents to only load
resources from URIs I expect it to (possibly even down to
specific URI paths), without affecting the containing web app or
any other web apps it also includes.
6. I'm a web application site administrator. My web app frames
other web apps whose behavior, properties, and policies are not
100% known or predictable.
I need to be able to apply policies that both protect my web app
from potential vulnerabilities or attacks introduced by the
framed web apps, and that work to ensure that the desired
interactions between my web app and the framed apps are securely
realized.
7. Detailed Functional Requirements
Many of the below functional requirements are extracted from a recent
discussion on the [public-web-security] list. Particular messages
are cited inline and appropriate quotes extracted and reproduced
here. Inline citations are provided for definitions of various
terms.
1. Policy expression syntax:
* Declarative.
<"declarative languages". http://www.encyclopedia.com/
doc/1O11-declarativelanguages.html>
* Extensible.
<"Extensibility".
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Extensible>
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<"Re: XSS mitigation in browsers" (Lucas Adamski). http://
lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-web-security/2011Jan/
0066.html>
"On a conceptual level, I am not really a believer in the
current proliferation of orthogonal atomic mechanisms
intended to solve very specific problems. Security is a
holistic discipline, and so I'm a big supporter of investing
in an extensible declarative security policy mechanism that
could evolve as the web and the threats that it faces do.
Web developers have a hard enough time with security already
without being expected to master a potentially large number
of different security mechanisms, each with their own unique
threat model, implementation and syntax. Not to mention
trying to figure out how they're expected to interact with
each other... how to manage the gaps and intersections
between the models."
<"Re: Scope and complexity (was Re: More on XSS mitigation)"
(Adam Barth). http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/
public-web-security/2011Jan/0108.html>
"I guess I wish we had an extensibility model more like HTML
where we could grow the security protections over time. For
example, we can probably agree that both <canvas> and <video>
are great additions to HTML that might not have made sense
when folks were designing HTML 1.0.
As long as you're not relying on the security policy as a
first line of defense, the extensibility story for security
policies is even better than it is with HTML tags. With an
HTML tag, you need a fall-back for browsers that don't
support the tag, whereas with a security policy, you'll
always have your first line of defense.
Ideally, we could come up with a policy mechanism that let us
nail XSS today and that fostered innovation in security for
years to come. In the short term, you could view the
existing CSP features (e.g., clickjacking protection) as the
first wave of innovation. If those pieces are popular, then
it should be easy for other folks to adopt them."
2. Tooling:
* We will need tools to (idealy) analyze a web application and
generate a starting point security policy.
<"Re: More on XSS mitigation" (John Wilander). http://
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lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-web-security/2011Jan/
0082.html>
"*Developers Will Want a Policy Generator* A key issue for
in-the-field success of CSP is how to write, generate and
maintain the policies. Just look at the epic failure of Java
security policies. The Java policy framework was designed
for static releases shipped on CDs, not for moving code,
added frameworks, new framework versions etc. The world of
web apps is so dynamic I'm still amazed. If anything, for
instance messy security policies, gets in the way of daily
releases it's a no go. At least until there's an exploit.
Where am I going with this? Well, we should implement a PoC
*policy generator* and run it on some fairly large websites
before we nail the standard. There will be subtleties found
which we can address and we can bring the PoC to production
level while the standard is being finalized and shipped in
browsers. Then we release the policy generator along with
policy enforcement -- success! "
3. Performance:
* Minimizing performance impact is a first-order concern.
<"Re: More on XSS mitigation" (John Wilander). http://
lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-web-security/2011Jan/
0082.html>
"*We Mustn't Spoil Performance* Web developers (and browser
developers) are so hung up on performance that we really need
to look at what they're up to and make sure we don't spoil
things. Especially load performance now that it's part of
Google's rating."
4. Granularity:
* For example, discriminate between:
+ "inline" script in <head> versus <body>, or not.
+ "inline" script and "src=" loaded script.
+ Classes of "content", e.g. scriptable content, passive
multimedia, nested documents, etc.
<"Proposal to move the debate forward" (Daniel Veditz). http://
lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-web-security/2011Jan/
0122.html>
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"We oscillated several times between lumpy and granular.
Fewer classes (simpler) is always more attractive, easier to
explain and understand. The danger is that future features
then end up being added to the existing lumps, possibly
enabling things that the site isn't aware they need to now
filter. It's a constant problem as we expand the
capabilities of browsers -- sites that used to be perfectly
secure are suddenly hackable because all the new browsers
added feature-X."
5. Notifications and reporting:
* Convey to the user agent an identifier (e.g. a URI) denoting
where to send policy violation reports. Could also specify a
DOM event to be dedicated for this purpose.
* An ability to specify that a origin's policies are to be
enforced in a "report only" mode will be useful for debugging
policies as well as site-policy interactions. E.g. for
answering the question: "does my policy 'break' my site?".
<"[Content Security Policy] Proposal to move the debate forward"
(Brandon Sterne). http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/
public-web-security/2011Jan/0118.html>
"...
3. Violation Reporting
a. report-uri: URI to which a report will be sent upon policy
violation
b. SecurityViolation event: DOM event fired upon policy violations
..."
6. Facilitating Separation of Duties:
* Specifically, allowing for Web Site operations/deployment
personnel to apply site policy, rather then having it being
encoded in the site implementation code by side developers/
implementors.
<"RE: Content Security Policy and iframe@sandbox" (Andrew
Steingruebl). http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/
public-web-security/2011Feb/0050.html>
"... 2. SiteC is also totally in control of all HTTP headers
it emits. It could just as easily indicate policy choices
for all frames via CSP. It could advertise a blanket policy
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(No JS, No ActiveX). Advertising a page-specific, or frame/
target specific policy is substantially more difficult and
probably unwieldy. But, depending on how SiteC is
configured, setting a global site policy via headers offers a
potential separation of duties that #1 does not, it allows
website admin to specific things that each web developer
might not be able to. ..."
7. Hierarchical Policy Application:
* The notion that policy emitted by the application's source
origin is able to constrain behavior and policies of
contained origins.
<"RE: Content Security Policy and iframe@sandbox" (Andrew
Steingruebl). http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/
public-web-security/2011Feb/0048.html>
"... I could imagine a tweak to CSP wherein CSP would
control all contents hierarchically. I already spoke to
Brandon about it, but it was just a quick brainstorm.
You could imagine revoking permissions in the frame hierarchy
and not granting them back. This does start to get awfully
ugly, but just as CSP controls loading policy for itself, it
could also control loading policy for children, ..."
8. Framing Policy Hierarchy, cross-origin, granularity:
<"Re: Content Security Policy and iframe@sandbox") (Andy
Steingruebl, Adam Barth) http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/
public-web-security/2011Feb/0051.html>
On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 9:01 PM, Steingruebl, Andy
<asteingruebl@paypal-inc.com> wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Adam Barth [mailto:w3c@adambarth.com]
>
>> That all sounds very abstract. If you have some concrete examples,
>> that might be more productive to discuss. When enforcing policy
>> supplied by one origin on another origin, we need to be careful to
>> consider the case where the policy providing origin is the attacker
>> and the origin on which the policy is being enforced is the victim.
>
> SiteA wants to make sure it cannot ever be framed. It deploys
X-Frame-Options headers and framebusting JS, and maybe even CSP
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frame-ancestors.
>
> SiteB wants to make sure it never loads data from anything other than
SiteB (no non-origin loads). It outputs CSP headers to this effect
>
> SiteC wants to make sure that any content it frames cannot run ActiveX
controls, nor do a 401 authentication. It can't really do this with
current iframe sandboxing, but pretend it could...
>
> SiteC wants to control the behavior of children that it frames. It
needs to advertise this policy to a web browser. It has two choices:
>
> 1. It can do it inline in the HTML it outputs with extra attributes of
the iframe it creates. SiteC is in complete control of the HTML that
creates the iframe. I can impose any policy via sandbox attributes.
Currently for example, it can disable JS in the frame. If it frames
SiteA, SiteA's framebusting JS will never run, but the browser will
respect its X-Frame-Options headers.
>
> 2. SiteC is also totally in control of all HTTP headers it emits. It
could just as easily indicate policy choices for all frames via CSP. It
could advertise a blanket policy (No JS, No ActiveX). Advertising a
page-specific, or frame/target specific policy is substantially more
difficult and probably unwieldy. But, depending on how SiteC is
configured, setting a global site policy via headers offers a potential
separation of duties that #1 does not, it allows website admin to
specific things that each web developer might not be able to.
>
> 3. Because all of Site A,B,C are in different origins, they don't
really have to worry about polluting other origins, but they do have to
worry about problematic behavior such as top-nav, 401-auth popups, etc.
Parents need to constrain certain behavior of things they embed,
according to certain rules of whether the child allows itself to be
framed.
>
> I totally get how existing iframe sandboxing that turns off JS is
problematic for sites [due to] older browsers that don't support
X-Frame-Options. We already have a complicated interaction between
these multiple security controls.
>
> Can you give me an example of why my #1/#2 are actually that
different? Whether we control behavior with headers of inline content,
each site is totally responsible for what it emits, and can already
control in some interesting ways the behavior of content it
frames/includes.
In this example, the trade-off for Site C seems to boil down to the
granularity of the policy. Using attributes on a frame is more
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fine-grained because Site C can make these decisions on an
iframe-by-iframe basis whereas using a document-wide policy is more
coarse-grained.
Of course, there's a trade-off between different granularities. On
the one hand, fine-grained gives the site more control over how
different iframes behavior. On the other hand, it's much easier to
audit and understand the effects of a coarse-grained policy.
Adam
9. Policy Delivery:
* The web application policy must be communicated by the web
application to the user agent. There are various approaches
and they have tradeoffs between security, audience, and
practicality.
<"[Content Security Policy] Proposal to move the debate forward"
(Brandon Sterne). http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/
public-web-security/2011Jan/0118.html>
"...
6. Policy delivery
a. HTTP header
b. <meta> (or <link>) tag, to be superseded by header if present
c. policy-uri: a URI from which the policy will be fetched; can be
specified in either header or tag
..."
<"Re: [Content Security Policy] Proposal to move the debate
forward" (gaz Heyes). http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/
public-web-security/2011Jan/0148.html>
"...
a) Policy shouldn't be defined in a http header it's too
messy and what happens when there's a mistake?
b) As discussed on the list there is no need to have a
separate method as it can be generated by an attacker. If a
policy doesn't exist then an attacker can now DOS the web
site via meta.
c) We have a winner, a http header specifying a link to the
policy file is the way to go IMO, my only problem with it is
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devs implementing it. Yes facebook would and probably
twitter would but Dave's tea shop wouldn't pay enough money
to hire a web dev who knew how to implement a custom http
header yet they would know how to validate HTML. So the
question is are we bothered about little sites that are
likely to have nice tea and XSS holes? If so I suggest
updating the HTML W3C validator to require a security policy
to pass validation if not I suggest a policy file delivered
by http header.
..."
10. Policy Conflict Resolution:
*
<"RE: Content Security Policy and iframe@sandbox" (Andrew
Steingruebl). http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/
public-web-security/2011Feb/0048.html>
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-web-security-request@w3.org [mailto:public-web-security-
> request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Adam Barth
>
> @sandbox and CSP are very different. The primary difference is who
> choses the policy. In the case of @sandbox, the embedder chooses
> the policy. In CSP, the provider of the resource chooses the policy.
While this is true today, I could imagine a tweak to CSP wherein CSP
would control all contents hierarchically. I already spoke to Brandon
about it, but it was just a quick brainstorm.
You could imagine revoking permissions in the frame hierarchy and not
granting them back. This does start to get awfully ugly, but just as
CSP controls loading policy for itself, it could also control loading
policy for children, right?
Fundamentally, since the existing security model doesn't really provide
for strict separation of parent/child (popups, 401's, top-nav) CSP and
iframe sandbox both try to control the behavior of resources we pull
from other parties.
Do we think that these are both special cases of a general security
policy (my intuition says yes) or that they have some quite orthogonal
types of security controls that cannot be mixed into a single policy
declaration?
One clear problem that comes to mind is that there are policies that
come from the "child" such as X-Frame-Options that must break the
ordinary parent/child relationship from a precedence standpoint.
8. Extant Policies to Coalesce
Presently, this section lists a grab-bag of individually-expressed
web app security policies which a more general substrate could
ostensibly encompass (in order to, for example, reduce "header bloat"
and bytes-on-the-wire issues), as well as reduce functional policy
duplication/overlap.
CORS
XDomainRequest
toStaticHtml
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innerSafeHtml
X-Frame-Options
CSP frame-ancestors
more?
9. Example Concrete Approaches
An overall, broad approach (from [0]):
As for an overall policy mechanism, we observe that leveraging a
combination of CSP [16] and ABE [19], or their employment in
tandem, as a starting point for a multi-vendor approach may be
reasonable. For a near-term policy delivery mechanism, we
advocate use of both HTTP headers and a policy file at a well-
known location. Leveraging DNSSEC is attractive in the
intermediate term, i.e. as it becomes more widely deployed.
10. Security Considerations
Security considerations go here.
11. References
[[TODO1: re-code refs into xml and place in proper refs section.
--JeffH]]
[0] J. Hodges, A. Steingruebl, "The Need for Coherent Web Security
Policy Framework(s)", Web 2.0 Security & Privacy, Oakland CA, 20 May
2010. http://w2spconf.com/2010/papers/p11.pdf
[1] Breach Security, "THE WEB HACKING INCIDENTS DATABASE 2009," Aug.
2009. http://www.breach.com/resources/whitepapers/downloads/
WP_TheWebHackingIncidents-2009.pdf
[2] R. Auger, The Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF/XSRF) FAQ, 2007.
http://www.cgisecurity.com/articles/csrf-faq.shtml
[3] A. Barth, J. Caballero, and D. Song, "Secure Content Sniffing for
Web Browsers--or How to Stop Papers from Reviewing Themselves,"
Proceedings of the 30th IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy,
Oakland, CA: 2009.
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[4] D. Goodin, "Major IE8 flaw makes 'safe' sites unsafe -
Microsoft's XSS buster busted," The Register, Nov. 2009. http://
www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/20/internet_explorer_security_flaw/
[5] J. Grossman, "Clickjacking: Web pages can see and hear you," Oct.
2008. http://jeremiahgrossman.blogspot.com/2008/10/
clickjacking-web-pages-can-see-and-hear.html
[6] W. Salusky, Malvertising, 2007.
http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=3727
[7] T. Dierks and E. Rescorla, "The Transport Layer Security (TLS)
Protocol Version 1.2," RFC5246, Internet Engineering Task Force, Aug.
2008. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5246.txt
[8] M. Marlinspike, SSLSTRIP, 2009.
http://www.thoughtcrime.org/software/sslstrip/
[9] Scope of HTTPOnly Cookies.
http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dxxqgkd_0cvcqhsdw
[10] E. Lawrence, IE8 Security Part VII: ClickJacking Defenses, 2009.
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/01/27/
ie8-security-part-vii-clickjacking-defenses.aspx
[11] J. Hodges, C. Jackson, and A. Barth, "Strict Transport
Security," Work-in-progress, Internet-Draft, Jul. 2010.
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hodges-strict-transport-sec
[12] A. Barth, C. Jackson, and I. Hickson, "The Web Origin Concept,"
Internet-Draft, work in progress, Internet Engineering Task Force,
2009. http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-abarth-origin
[13] E. Lawrence, IE8 Security Part VI: Beta 2 Update, 2008. http://
blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/09/02/
ie8-security-part-vi-beta-2-update.aspx
[14] G. Markham, Content restrictions, 2007.
http://www.gerv.net/security/content-restrictions/
[15] T. Jim, N. Swamy, and M. Hicks, "BEEP: Browser-Enforced Embedded
Policies," Proceedings of the 16th International World Wide Web
Conference, Banff, Alberta, Canada, 2007.
[16] B. Sterne, "Content Security Policy (CSP)," 2011. https://
dvcs.w3.org/hg/content-security-policy/raw-file/bcf1c45f312f/
csp-unofficial-draft-20110303.html
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[17] A.V. Kesteren, "Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS)," Mar.
2009. http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-cors-20090317/
[18] Adobe Systems, "Cross-domain policy file specification." http://
learn.adobe.com/wiki/download/attachments/64389123/
CrossDomain_PolicyFile_Specification.pdf?version=1
[19] G. Maone, ABE - Application Boundaries Enforcer, 2009.
http://noscript.net/abe/
[20] G. Maone, NoScript. http://noscript.net/
[21] G. Maone, ABE for Web Authors, 2009.
http://noscript.net/abe/web-authors.html
[22] Microsoft, "Event 1046 - Cross-Site Scripting Filter," MSDN
Library, undated.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd565647%28VS.85%29.aspx
[23] A. Barth, C. Jackson, and W. Li, "Attacks on JavaScript Mashup
Communication," Proceedings of the Web 2.0 Security and Privacy
Workshop, 2009.
[24] M. Ter Louw, P. Bisht, and V. Venkatakrishnan, "Analysis of
Hypertext Isolation Techniques for XSS Prevention," Proceedings of
the Web 2.0 Security and Privacy Workshop, 2008 .
[25] A. Ozment, S.E. Schechter, and R. Dhamija, "Web Sites Should Not
Need to Rely on Users to Secure Communications," W3C Workshop on
Transparency and Usability of Web Authentication, 2006.
[26] C. Reis, A. Barth, and C. Pizano, "Browser Security: Lessons
from Google Chrome," ACM Queue, 2009, pp. 1-8.
[27] H.J. Wang, C. Grier, A. Moshchuk, S.T. King, P. Choudhury, and
H. Venter, "The Multi-Principal OS Construction of the Gazelle Web
Browser," USENIX Security Symposium, 2009.
[28] M. Zalewski, Browser Security Handbook.
http://code.google.com/p/browsersec/
[29] A. Stamos, D. Thiel, and J. Osborne, Living in the RIA World:
Blurring the Line between Web and Desktop Security, BlackHat
presentation, iSecPartners, 2008.
https://www.isecpartners.com/files/RIA_World_BH_2008.pdf
[30] Mary Shelley, "Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus," ca.
1831. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein%27s_monster
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[31] D. Goodin, "cPanel, Netgear and Linksys susceptible to nasty
attack - Unholy Trinity," The Register, 2009.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/02/unholy_trinity_csrf/
[32] R. Arends, R. Austein, M. Larson, D. Massey, and S. Rose, "DNS
security introduction and requirements," RFC4033, Internet
Engineering Task Force, Mar. 2005.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4033.txt
[33] J.H. Saltzer and M.D. Schroeder, "The Protection of Information
in Computer Systems," Communications of the ACM, vol. 17, Jul. 1974.
[34] I. Hickson and many others, "Comments on the Content Security
Policy specification," discussion on mozilla.dev.security newsgroup.
http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.security/browse_frm/
thread/
87ebe5cb9735d8ca?tvc=1&
q=Comments+on+the+Content+Security+Policy+specification
[35] S. Egelman, L.F. Cranor, and J. Hong, "You've Been Warned: An
Empirical Study of the Effectiveness of Web Browser Phishing
Warnings," CHI 2008, April 5 - 10, 2008, Florence, Italy, 2008.
[36] S.E. Schechter, R. Dhamija, A. Ozment, and I. Fischer, "The
Emperor's New Security Indicators," Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE
Symposium on Security and Privacy.
[37] R. Dhamija and J.D. Tygar, "The Battle Against Phishing: Dynamic
Security Skins," Proceedings of the 2005 Symposium on Usable Privacy
and Security (SOUPS).
[38] J. Sobey, T. Whalen, R. Biddle, P.V. Oorschot, and A.S. Patrick,
Browser Interfaces and Extended Validation SSL Certificates: An
Empirical Study, Ottawa, Canada: School of Computer Science, Carleton
University, 2009.
[39] J. Sunshine, S. Egelman, H. Almuhimedi, N. Atri, and L.F.
Cranor, "Crying Wolf: An Empirical Study of SSL Warning
Effectiveness," USENIX Security Symposium, 2009.
[40] C. Jackson and A. Barth, "ForceHTTPS: Protecting High-Security
Web Sites from Network Attacks," Proceedings of the 17th
International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), 2008.
[41] Microsoft, "Packaging Wizard."
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa157732(office.10).aspx
[42] Mozilla, "Options window."
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http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Options+window
[43] S. Yegulalp, "Hacking Firefox: The secrets of about:config,"
ComputerWorld, May. 2007. http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/
9020880/Hacking_Firefox_The_secrets_of_about_config
12. Informative References
[Clickjacking]
"Clickjacking", Sep 2008,
<http://www.sectheory.com/clickjacking.htm>.
[I-D.ietf-websec-strict-transport-sec]
Hodges, J., Jackson, C., and A. Barth, "HTTP Strict
Transport Security (HSTS)",
draft-ietf-websec-strict-transport-sec-11 (work in
progress), July 2012.
[UIRedress]
"Dealing with UI redress vulnerabilities inherent to the
current web", Sep 2008, <http://lists.whatwg.org/
htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2008-September/016284.html>.
[WASC-THREAT]
Web Application Security Consortium, "The WASC Threat
Classification v2.0", January 2010,
<http://projects.webappsec.org/f/WASC-TC-v2_0.pdf>.
[WebSec] "Web HTTP Application Security Minus Authentication and
Transport",
<https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/websec>.
[public-web-security]
"public-web-security@w3.org: Improving standards and
implementations to advance the security of the Web.",
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/
public-web-security/>.
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Author's Address
Jeff Hodges
PayPal
2211 North First Street
San Jose, California 95131
US
Email: Jeff.Hodges@PayPal.com
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