Ideas (and risks) for server hosted tiddlywikis

[Xavier Verges]

If signed.applets.codebase_principal_support is enabled in Firefox,
http urls can be allowed to do xpcom stuff (and, thus, access your
disk). Lots of interesting and scary possibilities.

More info at
http://messfromabove.tiddlyspot.com/

-Xv

[FND]

> If signed.applets.codebase_principal_support is enabled in Firefox,
> http urls can be allowed to do xpcom stuff (and, thus, access your
> disk). Lots of interesting and scary possibilities.

Scary indeed!
I understand TiddlyWiki does *not* prompt for permission to enable this
component?

It's also an interesting possibility, of course - but as a user, I'd be
very wary of something like this.

-- F.

[Xavier Verges]

> I understand TiddlyWiki does *not* prompt for permission to enable this
> component?

No, it doesn't. You have to enable this setting by hand. And once
you've done it, no remote site can do anything without Firefox
prompting you to grant it persmissions.

> It's also an interesting possibility, of course - but as a user, I'd be
> very wary of something like this.

If
a) it is your tiddlywiki
b) you trust the server were it is hosted (i.e., they are not evil and
they are good dealing with security so that evil guys won't be
controlling their servers)
c) you are accessing there using https (so that you know that them is
really them)
there is nothing to be scared of.

But, how many times have some of us donwloaded a firefox extension
without using https and knowing nothing about the code? That isn't any
safer.

-Xv

[Eric Shulman]

> No, it doesn't. You have to enable this setting by hand. And once
> you've done it, no remote site can do anything without Firefox
> prompting you to grant it persmissions.

This also applies to local file:// URLs

-e

[Xavier Verges]

Eric, note that Firefox will consider giving permissions to file://
urls no matter the value of signed.applets.codebase_principal_support
http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/caps/src/nsPrincipal.cpp#436

My understanding of what happens is as follows:

if (not file url)
if (not signed.applets.codebase_principal_support)
discard privileges request
if (url speciefied in capability.principal.codebase preferences
branch)
act according to preferences
else
prompt
if ("remember this" is checked)
update the capability.principal.codebase preferences branch

-Xv

[FND]

> No, it doesn't. You have to enable this setting by hand.

So users would have to go to about:config - on the one hand, that's
comforting, but it also prevents wide adoption...

> how many times have some of us donwloaded a firefox extension without
> using https and knowing nothing about the code? That isn't any safer.

Good point.

-- F.

[Xavier Verges]

Enabling signed.applets.codebase_principal_support and visiting their
site is a good excercise for people publish tiddlywiks.

Imo, getting a prompt that "A script on xxx is requesting..." when
loading a page gives an awful impression.

It just happened to me at
* tiddlytools.com Prompted once
* tiddlythemes.com Almost a DOS attack :-) Entered in a loop of
prompts

But, hey, I did not get a bad impression of you guys :-)

-Xv

[Xavier Verges]

I changed the severity of
http://trac.tiddlywiki.org/ticket/101
related to unicode functions, because they are guilty of causing
security prompts.

-Xv

[Eric Shulman]

> I changed the severity of http://trac.tiddlywiki.org/ticket/101
> related to unicode functions, because they are guilty of causing
> security prompts.

See http://trac.tiddlywiki.org/ticket/532 for additional issues
related to UnicodeToUTF8 character conversions.

-e