| >Mozilla is working on adding/replacing parts of Firefox with a language emphasizing security (among other things). The safety of the implementation language is far from the only concern when considering the security impact of modern browser features. The recent WebRTC issues are well documented, as was the HSTS 'supercookies' issue. Even something seemingly fairly innocuous like css keyframe animation can be used to do remote timing attacks without js to leak browser state such as browsing history[1]. SVG filters in Firefox allowed information to be read from arbitrary pages through timing attacks, till they removed some of the optimisations[2]. Those kinds of things are not solvable with a safer language (in some cases that probably makes fixing timing attacks more difficult/impossible). I'm sure there are more of these kinds of things to be found. Some of them are realistically never going to be fixed now because they are baked into the standards and the browser vendors clearly care more about animating gizmos and not breaking existing sites than leaking users browser state. [1] https://www.nds.rub.de/media/nds/veroeffentlichungen/2014/07... [2] http://www.contextis.com/documents/2/Browser_Timing_Attacks.... and https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2013-5... Read the bug to see how difficult it was for the devs to fix the issues without making the feature unusable - it took years >I'd have added "You can install links if you want a simple browser letting you read static html documents", which you would have answered with "But I can't, every website require these features now", to which I'd have answered "a. Yeah, not everyone (that's an understatement) does progressive enhancement, but ultimately b. The times they are a-changing" I'm not concerned about myself. I disable stuff like WebGL that I don't use, and I block most Javascript etc etc. My concern is for the average user who has absolutely no idea these features even exist, never mind knowing which ones they can turn off without breaking the sites they use. The general insecurity of the web affects me (and everybody else). When a site gets hacked because one of the admins was exploited by a browser vulnerability and my details get leaked that affects me. |
Good points, didn't know about the SVG exploit having taken so long. Rust (which, as you say, is no silver bullet) is one data point showing Mozilla's commitment to security, but the variance in the time to fixing exploits is worth consideration. Today's exploit was fixed in one day, SVG took 18 months. Why? Did Moz do a good job at prioritizing based on the severity / availability of exploits in the wild, or was the long time to SVG fix just caused by technical difficulties? I don't know, maybe a mozillian involved can comment.