- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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Why do I need to know all of this stuff, why isn’t the web safe by default?
The answer to questions like this is often that there was no need for such safety features when the underlying technology was introduced (more examples here) and adding it later required consensus from many people and organizations who wouldn’t accept something that broke their already-running systems. It’s easy to criticize something when you don’t understand the needs and constraints that led to it.
(The good news is that gradual changes, over the course of years, can further improve things without being too disruptive to survive.)
He’s not wrong in principle, though: Building safe web sites is far more complicated than it should be, and relies far too much on a site to behave in the user’s best interests. Especially when client-side scripts are used.
It’s easy to criticize something when you don’t understand the needs and constraints that led to it.
And that assumption is exactly what led us to the current situation.
It doesn’t matter, why the present is garbage, it’s garbage and we should address that. Statements like this are the engineering equivalent of “it is what it is shrug emoji”.
Take a step back and look at the pile of overengineered yet underthought, inefficient, insecure and complicated crap that we call the modern web. And it’s not only the browser, but also the backend stack.
Think about how many indirections and half-baked abstraction layers are between your code and what actually gets executed.
Statements like this are the engineering equivalent of “it is what it is shrug emoji”.
No, what I wrote is nothing like that. Please re-read until you understand it better.
Unless I’m missing something, the post is plain wrong in some parts. You can’t POST to a Cross-Site API because the browser will send a CORS preflight first before sending the real request. The only way around that are iirc form submits, for that you need csrf protection.
Also the CORS proxy statement is wrong if I don’t misunderstand their point. They don’t break security because they are obviously not the cookie domain. They’re the proxy domain so the browser will never send cookies to it.
Anyways, don’t trust the post or me. Just read https://owasp.org/ for web security advice.