3 ms·

All doors are open for side channel leaks. Having programs run on your machine is like having someone watch your computer. The issue is how to control the exfil

• anglebracket 8y ago
  Yes, this isn't even the first cross-domain leakage attack on iframes using CSS. [0] There were similar issues with how hit testing was implemented for `document.elementFromPoint()`[1], and probably tons of other things I'm forgetting. Ideally cross-origin framing would have been disallowed by default but frames were added to the spec before people spent a lot of time thinking about the same-origin-policy implications. [0]: https://www.contextis.com/resources/white-papers/pixel-perfect-timing-attacks-with-html5 https://www.contextis.com/resources/white-papers/pixel-perfe... [1]: http://blog.saynotolinux.com/blog/2014/02/05/whats-that-smell-sniffing-cross-origin-frames-in-firefox/ http://blog.saynotolinux.com/blog/2014/02/05/whats-that-smel...
• _yosefk 8y ago
  Not sure why this is being downvoted. I admit that I find it hard to see how to control the exfiltration of data once it's been figured out by a badly sandboxed program. But the idea that systematically addressing side channel attacks in a sandbox is really hard seems very valid. I mean, the exploit described in TFA is quite the argument in favor of this point.
• ploxiln 8y ago
  I wonder if we'll ever get back to "go ahead and browse random script-free websites, but only run trusted code". I guess it's way too late for that. We'll be patching side-channels forever.