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There’s a lot of steps that are failing to produce this problem: - The browser could do a better job of making sure a text selection only includes the expected

by tobr 7y ago

There’s a lot of steps that are failing to produce this problem: - The browser could do a better job of making sure a text selection only includes the expected content (this is not just a security issue - I often find that text copied from websites include unexpected words or whitespace). - The browser could do a better job showing you what it is putting on your clipboard. For example, they could briefly overlay the text they copy on the selection, in a way that would be virtually unnoticeable when you copied the expected text, but reveals the difference if the content somehow changed. - The system could do a better job showing users what the clipboard contains. The fact that clipboards are completely invisible in most OSes is kind of weird, and also has privacy implications, for example if you copy something sensitive on a public machine and forget to clear it. - The system could implement a way to flag clipboard items as “untrusted”, and require apps to implement adequate checks if you paste something that can have security implications. - When you paste into a terminal, it should probably give you a chance to see what you’re pasting before it tries to execute. After all, this is the place where the actual security problem happens.

danShumway 7y ago
I agree with the majority of this. However: > The browser could do a better job of making sure a text selection only includes the expected content (this is not just a security issue - I often find that text copied from websites include unexpected words or whitespace). I disagree this is necessarily a good goal for the browser to have, or that it's feasible for the browser to identify what the "expected" text is. Even in the area of stripping extra whitespace, sometimes extra whitespace is expected. It's worth noting that browsers already strip unnecessary whitespace like linebreaks and double spaces by default. The extra whitespace that shows up in text you copy is there because a site deliberately added characters or elements that bypass that behavior (I'm looking at you, Twitter, stop #!&%?@ breaking all your input fields). So relying on signals from the page itself isn't enough to mitigate this problem, since pages give bad signals. The browser would need to be smart enough to know on its own when whitespace was being inserted because it was important, and when it was being inserted to add an extra linebreak or something. I am skeptical that it's possible to build a browser that smart without simultaneously turning it into a buggy, unpredictable mess whenever you encounter edge-case content. My mantra in situations like this is, "don't come up with a solution that is more complicated than the problem you are trying to solve." Most of the solutions I've heard proposed as to how the browser is going to accomplish this sound really complicated, at least to me.

by tobr 7y ago

danShumway 7y ago

I agree with the majority of this. However: > The browser could do a better job of making sure a text selection only includes the expected content (this is not just a security issue - I often find that text copied from websites include unexpected words or whitespace). I disagree this is necessarily a good goal for the browser to have, or that it's feasible for the browser to identify what the "expected" text is. Even in the area of stripping extra whitespace, sometimes extra whitespace is expected. It's worth noting that browsers already strip unnecessary whitespace like linebreaks and double spaces by default. The extra whitespace that shows up in text you copy is there because a site deliberately added characters or elements that bypass that behavior (I'm looking at you, Twitter, stop #!&%?@ breaking all your input fields). So relying on signals from the page itself isn't enough to mitigate this problem, since pages give bad signals. The browser would need to be smart enough to know on its own when whitespace was being inserted because it was important, and when it was being inserted to add an extra linebreak or something. I am skeptical that it's possible to build a browser that smart without simultaneously turning it into a buggy, unpredictable mess whenever you encounter edge-case content. My mantra in situations like this is, "don't come up with a solution that is more complicated than the problem you are trying to solve." Most of the solutions I've heard proposed as to how the browser is going to accomplish this sound really complicated, at least to me.