nodeSolidServer / nodeSolidServer/node-solid-server

Access control by origin header not working?

Open
#986 6 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Dominant language
JavaScript
Stars
1.8k
Forks
308
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

First a disclaimer - it is very difficult to find any documentation about access control for web-apps, so I am possibly wrong here. But here we go anyway ...

Assuming I have a browser web-app that lets me register my pets. My pets are very valuable to me and I really don't want any other web-apps to snoop into my pet collection even if I am logged in to my POD with some third party web-app.

How do I prohibit other web-apps from accessing my pets? Well, first of all I make sure that access control for my /pets folder is "specific" according to the data browser, which seems to be identical to creating a .acl file for the container. Then what?

At https://www.w3.org/wiki/WebAccessControl#Giving_a_specific_resource_access_to_an_Origin the following is suggested:

[] acl:accessToClass [ acl:regex "https://bblfish.solid.example/.*" ];  
   acl:mode acl:Write; 
   acl:origin <https://apps.rww.io>  .

So I add acl:origin <https://nothinguseful.org> to verify that no existing app, not even my own pet-app, have access and try to work with the data from the pet-app ... and still have complete access.

The ACL file is located at https://elfisk.solid.community/places/hobby/.acl and contains:

@prefix : <#>.
@prefix n0: <http://www.w3.org/ns/auth/acl#>.
@prefix hobby: <./>.
@prefix c: </profile/card#>.

:owner
    n0:accessTo hobby:;
    n0:agent c:me, <mailto:jw@elfisk.dk>;
    n0:defaultForNew hobby:;
    n0:mode n0:Control, n0:Read, n0:Write;
    n0:origin <https://nothinguseful.org>.

The HTTP request sent is:

PUT https://elfisk.solid.community/places/hobby/yyy HTTP/1.1
Host: elfisk.solid.community
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 347
authorization: Bearer ...
Origin: https://solidrc.azurewebsites.net
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.110 Safari/537.36
content-type: text/turtle
Accept: */*
Referer: https://solidrc.azurewebsites.net/Home/Locations
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br
Accept-Language: da-DK,da;q=0.9,en-US;q=0.8,en;q=0.7,sv;q=0.6,nb;q=0.5
Cookie: connect.sid=...
DNT: 1

@prefix : <#>. ... more turtle stuff ...

As you can see, the origin header is Origin: https://solidrc.azurewebsites.net - which is not matching the acl:origin value.

Is this a bug or me completely misunderstanding it all?

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 by reviewing the linked Web Access Control guidance and the supplied ACL at /places/hobby/.acl alongside the PUT request's Origin header. Trace the server's authorization handling for acl:origin and verify whether a non-matching origin is denied, while distinguishing browser CORS behavior from server-side access control. Done means the behavior is explained and, if it is a bug, covered by a reproducible test.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
javascript
Domain
authorization, security
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.