5 ms·

"The engineering equivalent of a car made of duct tape" Kind of. But do you have a better proposition?

• gmueckl 1y ago
  A part of the issue is IMO that browsers have become ridiculously bloated everything-programs. You could take about 90% of that out and into dedicated tools and end up with something vastly saner and safer and not a lot less capable for all practical purposes. Instead, we collectively are OK with frosting this atrocious layer cake that is today's web with multiple flavors of security measures of sometimes questionable utility. End of random rant.
  • sefrost 1y ago
    You are right from a technical point, I think, but in reality - how would one begin to make that change?
  • lukan 1y ago
    "You could take about 90% of that out and into dedicated tools " But then you would loose plattform independency, the main selling point of this atrocity. Having all those APIs in a sandbox that mostly just work on billion devices is pretty powerful and a potential succesor to HTML would have to beat that, to be adopted. The best thing to happen, that I can see, is that a sane subset crystalizes, that people start to use dominantly, with the rest becoming legacy, only maintained to have it still working. But I do dream of a fresh rewrite of the web since university (and the web was way slimmer back then), but I got a bit more pragmatic and I think I understood now the massive problem of solving trusted human communication better. It ain't easy in the real world.
    • gmueckl 1y ago
      But do we need e.g serial port or raw USB access straight from a random website? Even WebRTC is a bit of a stretch. There is a lot of cruft in modern browsers that does little except increase attack surface. This all just drives a need to come up with ever more tacked-on protection schemes because browsers have big targets painted on them.
      • shadowgovt 1y ago
        How else am I going to make a game in the browser that be controlled with a controller?
        • gmueckl 1y ago
          Every decent host OS already has a dedicated driver stack to provide game controller input to applications in a useful manner. Why the heck would you ship a reimplementation of that in JS in a website?
          • shadowgovt 1y ago
            So that you can take input from countrollers that haven't been invented yet and won't fit the HID model.
            • gmueckl 1y ago
              If it hasn't been invented yet, you don't need driver software for it, do you? ;) Anyway, in your scenario the controller would be essentially a one off and you'd be better off writing a native app to interface with it for the one computer this experiment will run on.
            • account42 1y ago
              If it hasn't been invented yet we don't know the implications of giving a website access to it either. And that's before realizing it's already a bad idea with existing devices because they were never designed for giving untrusted actors direct access.
              • shadowgovt 1y ago
                That's why we have a privacy and security sandbox in browsers.
        • account42 1y ago
          You don't, that's the point: not everything needs to be crammed into a browser.
    • smaudet 1y ago
      > Having all those APIs in a sandbox that mostly just work on billion devices is pretty powerful and a potential succesor to HTML would have to beat that, to be adopted. I think the giant major downside, is that they've written a rootkit that runs on everything, and to try to make up for that they want to make it so only sites they allow can run. It's not really very powerful at all if nobody can use it, at that point you are better off just not bothering with it at all. The Internet may remain, but the Web may really be dead.
      • lukan 1y ago
        "It's not really very powerful at all if nobody can use it" But people do use it, like the both of us right now? People also use maps, do online banking, play games, start complex interactive learning environments, collaborate in real time on documents etc. All of that works right now.
      • sofixa 1y ago
        > to try to make up for that they want to make it so only sites they allow can run What do you mean, you can run whatever you want on localhost, and it's quite easy to host whatever you want for whoever you want too. Maybe the biggest modern added barrier to entry is that having TLS is strongly encouraged/even needed for some things, but this is an easily solved problem.
        • lkjdsklf 1y ago
          The blog post and several anecdotes in the comments prove otherwise
    • ngold 1y ago
      Not sure if it counts but I've been enjoying librewolf. I believe just a stripped down firefox.
  • nemothekid 1y ago
    >A part of the issue is IMO that browsers have become ridiculously bloated everything-programs. I don't see how that solves the issue that PSL tries to fix. I was a script kiddy hosting neopets phishing pages on free cpanel servers from <random>.ripway.com back in 2007. Browsers were way less capable then.
    • lukan 1y ago
      PSL and the way cookies work is just part of the mess. A new approach could solve that in a different way, taking into account all the experience we had with scriptkiddies and professional scammers and pishers since then. But I also don't really have an idea where and how to start.
      • shadowgovt 1y ago
        And of course, if the new solution completely invalidates old sites, it just won't get picked up. People prefer slightly broken but accessible to better designed but inaccessible.
        • motorest 1y ago
          > People prefer slightly broken but accessible to better designed but inaccessible. It's not even broken as the edge cases are addressed by ad-hoc solutions. OP is complaining about global infrastructure not having a pristine design. At best it's a complain over a desirable trait. It's hardly a reason to pull the Jr developer card and mindlessly advocate for throwing everything out and starting over.
        • friendzis 1y ago
          > People prefer slightly broken but accessible to better designed but inaccessible. We live in world where whatever faang adopts is de facto a standard. Accessible these days means google/gmail/facebook/instagram/tiktok works. Everything else is usually forced to follow along. People will adopt whatever gives them access to their daily dose of doomscrolling and then complain about rather crucial part of their lives like online banking not working. > And of course, if the new solution completely invalidates old sites, it just won't get picked up. Old sites don't matter, only high-traffic sites riddled with dark patterns matter. That's the reality, even if it is harsh.
  • Kim_Bruning 1y ago
    Are you saying we should make a <Unix Equivalent Of A Browser?> A large set of really simple tools that each do one thing really really really pedantically well? This might be what's needed to break out of the current local optimum.
    • gmueckl 1y ago
      I haven't thought of it that way, but that might be a solution.
      • magackame 1y ago
        There was an attempt in that direction. https://www.uzbl.org/ https://www.uzbl.org/
    • acka 1y ago
      Maybe it's time to revive something like the uzbl[1] project, or start something similar. [1] https://www.uzbl.org/ https://www.uzbl.org/
• jadengeller 1y ago
  I'd probably say we ought to use DNS.
  • asplake 1y ago
    And while we’re at it, 1) mark domains as https-only, and 2) when root domains map to a subdomain (eg www).
    • account42 1y ago
      I might amuse you to know hat we also already have a text file as a solution for https-only sites.
• Groxx 1y ago
  I'm under the impression that CORS largely solves it? which is still much too new to be able to shut down the PSL of course. but maybe in 2050.
  • Groxx 1y ago
    Since this is being downvoted: no, I'm quite serious. CORS lets sites define their own security boundaries between subdomains, with mutual validation. If you're hosting user content in a subdomain, just don't allow-origin it: that is a clear statement that it's not "the same site". PSL plays absolutely no part in that logic, it seems clear to me that it's at least in part intended to replace the PSL. Do other sites (like google's safety checks) use CORS for this purpose? Dunno. Seems like they could though? Or am I missing something?
• 0xbadcafebee 1y ago
  Cookies shouldn't be tied to domains at all, it's a kludge. They should be tied to cryptographic keypairs (client + server). If the web server needs a cookie, it should request one (in its reply to the client's first request for a given url; the client can submit again to "reply" to this "request"). The client can decide whether it wants to hand over cookie data, and can withhold it from servers that use different or invalid keys. The client can also sign the response. This solves many different security concerns, privacy concerns, and also eliminates the dependency on specific domain names. I just came up with that in 2 minutes, so it might not be perfect, but you can see how with a little bit of work there's much better solutions than "I check for not-evil domain in list!"
  • progval 1y ago
    > They should be tied to cryptographic keypairs (client + server). So now, if a website leaks its private key, attackers can exfiltrate cookies from all of its users just by making them open an attacker-controlled link, for as long as the cookie lives (and users don't visit the website to get the rotated key). > If the web server needs a cookie, it should request one This adds a round-trip, which slows down the website on slow connections. > the client can submit again to "reply" to this "request" This requires significantly overhauling HTTP and load-balancers. The public-suffix list exists because it's an easy workaround that didn't take a decade to specify and implement.
    • 0xbadcafebee 1y ago
      > So now, if a website leaks its private key, attackers can exfiltrate cookies from all of its users just by making them open an attacker-controlled link This attack already exists in several forms (leaking a TLS private key, DNS hijack, CA validation attack, etc). You could tack a DNS name onto the crypto-cookies if you wanted to, but DNS is trivial to attack. > This adds a round-trip, which slows down the website on slow connections. Requests are already slowed down by the gigantic amount of cookies constantly being pushed by default. The server can send a reply-header once which will tell the client which URLs need cookies perpetually, and the client can store that and choose whether it sends the cookies repeatedly or just when requested. This gives the client much more control over when it leaks users' data. > This requires significantly overhauling HTTP and load-balancers No change is needed. Web applications already do all of this all the time. (example: the Location: header is frequently sent by web apps in response to specific requests, to say nothing of REST and its many different request and return methods/statuses/headers). > The public-suffix list exists because it's an easy workaround So the engine of modern commerce is just a collection of easy hacks. Fantastic.