ACTION-111: Provide guidance on efficient enforcment of display-time

Provide guidance on efficient enforcment of display-time

State:
closed
Person:
Giorgio Maone
Due on:
January 22, 2013
Created on:
January 15, 2013
Associated Issue:
ISSUE-27
Related emails:
No related emails

Related notes:

In the current draft http://www.w3.org/TR/UISafety/ the paragraph devoted to this matter are the following two:

5.1 Preparation
[...]
Display changes tracking - whenever a repaint occurs in the topmost window or in one of its descendants, create a record containing a weak reference to the document causing the repaint, the screen coordinates of the regions being repainted and a timestamp detailing when the repaint occurred, and add this record to a screen-global list named "Display Changes List". Records older than the maximum value for input-protection's display-time can be discarded on update.

5.2 UI Event handling

Timing attacks countermeasure - check whether the "Display Change List" contains any record younger than the input-protection's display-time value, whose repainted regions intersect with the protected UI elements and whose repaint-causing document is different than the protected one. If this is true, hinting at a recent change in the way the protected UI is displayed, with causes external to the UI itself (e.g. an overlapping element in an ancestor document or a floating window being suddenly moved away), assume a timing attack is happening [...]

These, of course, are non-normative and based on my own experience about trying to provide a similar protection *within the limitations of a Firefox extension*, i.e. hacking around very limited APIs such as the MozAfterRepaint event. I'm pretty sure user agent implementers, having direct access to the OS-provided facilities and directly managing their own display lists, reflows and so on, are in a much better position to figure out the most efficient strategy for enforcing this feature in an optimized way. Therefore I believe we can either poll the browser vendors' expert (developers of the layout/gfx components, I guess) for generally valid hints (if any), or leave the specification as it is and let each browser vendor figure out what works best for his own specific implementation.

Giorgio Maone, 10 Feb 2013, 19:58:21

Display change log.


Daniel Veditz <dveditz@mozilla.com>, Mike West <mkwst@google.com>, Chairs, Wendy Seltzer <wseltzer@w3.org>, Samuel Weiler <weiler@w3.org>, Staff Contacts
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