5 ms·
I think a lot of people are unclear on the threat model here. If I have it correct, there's no way around it: either you live with the privacy leak, or you disa
by hyperpape 7y ago
I think a lot of people are unclear on the threat model here. If I have it correct, there's no way around it: either you live with the privacy leak, or you disable the shared cache.
The threat is that when you navigate to creepy website, it loads some library and tracks the timing. They use that to infer that you've accessed some resource from a sensitive site.
None of the workarounds with extra attributes are going to help, because they rely on the web developer to
1. know about the attack
2. know that some library or asset is a realistic candidate for the attack, and take appropriate action.
Neither one is that realistic. We developers are just too lazy to get stuff like that right, even if we know about it. Cargo culting is the rule.
As for the effects, I suspect this will have a modest effect on the average website. The sources I've encountered seem to cast doubt on the effectiveness of share cache (https://justinblank.com/notebooks/browsercacheeffectiveness.html https://justinblank.com/notebooks/browsercacheeffectiveness....). I poked around the mod pagespeed docs and project, and couldn't find any indication of how they'd measured impacts when they implemented the canonicalization feature.
I wonder if you'll see a big impact on companies like Squarespace and Wix, where there are a lot of custom domains that are all built using the same stack.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]