Re: Redirects continued -- was: Problem with certificate on home-grown WebID

On 21 Dec 2011, at 18:51, Mo McRoberts wrote:

> 
> On 21 Dec 2011, at 17:46, Henry Story wrote:
> 
>> Ok. Lots of good reasons for redirects then in ISSUE-64 :-)  Now we just should look at security issues.
>> 
>> I remember Peter Williams bringing up infinite redirects, max number of redirects, ... But perhaps there are also other scenarios which evil characters can use to waylay people. 
> 
> There are three common scenarios I can think of, but there may be others:—
> 
> Infinite redirects is the usual one (limited by a 'max redirects' setting in many UAs)
> 
> There’s also 'redirecting to things which you wouldn't ordinarily allow navigation to without direct user intervention' (e.g., about:config or telnet: URIs) — only affects same UAs, but is important nonetheless.
> 
> If you’re making use of information delivered by transport-layer security to help validate the resource, then if that secured resource redirects you to an unsecured resource, you need to act accordingly (e.g., just because it starts off as HTTPS with DNSSEC verifiable for the hostname doesn't mean it'll end up that way — you treat the whole chain as being as secure as the weakest link along it).

yes, I have the following in the spec on that topic

"The trust that can be had in that statement is therefore the trust that one can have in one's having received the correct representation of the document that defined that WebID. An HTTPS WebID will therefore be a lot more trustworthy than an HTTP WebID by a factor of the likelihood of man in the middle attacks."

So we need to work redirects into this somehow. Perhaps by adding an example in terms of http which has redirects.

Henry

> 
> M.
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Received on Thursday, 22 December 2011 09:16:06 UTC