WICG / WICG/webpackage

Site might phish a site that archives it

Open
#599 3 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Dominant language
Go
Stars
1.3k
Forks
125
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

I've been designing as if we could have a page like https://web.archive.org/web/20200914192731/https://www.example.com/ serve a web bundle that it doesn't do a lot of work to vet because it winds up executing in a suborigin. However, @wycats pointed out that that could allow https://web.archive.org/web/20200914192731/https://attack.web.archive.evil.example/ to show a login form for https://web.archive.org, and because the browser would emphasize the serving origin, it would probably fool the user. See also some discussion on #560.

A couple thoughts:

  • This is still better than the current situation, where an unvalidated archived site can just exfiltrate login cookies.
  • Some discussion in #576 suggests a way to mark a bundle as having no network access, which might prevent it from using any credentials it manages to phish. Is that sufficient?
  • This probably isn't a worry for bundles accessed as file:s?

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with the issue’s archived-URL phishing scenario and read the linked bundle-urls-and-origins.md explainer. Review the related discussions in #560 and #576, including the proposed no-network-access bundle behavior. Done means reaching and documenting a clear security decision about whether the proposed origin and network protections prevent credential phishing.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
security
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
20/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.