Intent to Prototype: Local Network Access allowing same-origin fetches to potentially trustworthy origins

[Jonathan Hao]

Note that Private Network Access is in the process of being renamed to Local Network Access, so you may see inconsistent names for the time being.

Contact emails

ph...@chromium.org, tit...@chromium.org, va...@chromium.org, cl...@chromium.org

Explainer

https://github.com/WICG/local-network-access/blob/main/explainer.md

Specification

https://wicg.github.io/local-network-access

Design docs

Local Network Access: Allow Potentially Trustworthy Same-Origin Fetches

Private Network Access: Preflight requests for subresources

Summary

Allow same-origin local network fetches to potentially-trustworthy origins and do not send preflights for them. We currently send preflights before all local network requests, but ignore the results, as proposed in Intent to Ship: Private Network Access preflight requests for subresources.

Blink component

Blink>SecurityFeature>CORS>PrivateNetworkAccess

Motivation

We haven’t been able to enforce the preflight results for private network requests because the compat risk is still too high. See this thread for discussions about the compat risk involved.

Preliminary metric data in dev and beta show that by excluding same-origin requests, we can reduce the number of ignored warnings by ~2x.  Reducing the compat risk gets us closer to start enforcing the preflight results.

Initial public proposal

https://discourse.wicg.io/t/transfer-cors-rfc1918-and-hsts-priming-to-wicg/1726

TAG review

https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/572

TAG review status

Added an FYI comment about this change.

Risks

Interoperability and Compatibility

This change reduces the compatibility risk of enforcing preflight results on private network requests as we now send fewer preflights for private network requests, so it’s less likely to break websites.

Gecko: No signal about this specific change.

WebKit: No signal about this specific change.

Web developers: No signal about this specific change, but they should be happy since this reduces compatibility risks.

Other signals:

Ergonomics

None.

Activation

We plan to ship this change directly as this relaxes the previous restrictions.

Security

This change is limited to potentially trustworthy origins. Proof of certificate protects users from DNS rebinding.

WebView application risks

There’s no plan to ship Local Network Access on WebView.

Debuggability

Relevant information (client and resource IP address space) is already piped into the DevTools network panel.

Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests?

Yes

DevTrial instructions

https://github.com/WICG/private-network-access/blob/main/HOWTO.md

Flag name

LocalNetworkAccessAllowPotentiallyTrustworthySameOrigin

Requires code in //chrome?

Only for metric logging

Tracking bug

https://crbug.com/1382068

Launch bug

https://crbug.com/1274149

Estimated milestones

Desktop 113

Android 113

Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status

https://chromestatus.com/feature/5737414355058688

Links to previous Intent discussions

Intent to prototype: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/PrB0xnNxaHs/m/jeoxvNjXCAAJ

Intent to Experiment: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/CAOC%3DiP%2Bew8hADZkdQ3AO6P9WzfGuzLPp9JjJZqztV5oZmaK8oQ%40mail.gmail.com

Intent to Ship: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/72CK2mxD47c

Intent to Deprecate and Remove: Private Network Access requests for subresources without proper preflight response: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/FlenxUPCDec/m/FNJ0wCmKBAAJ 

This intent message was generated by Chrome Platform Status.