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Firefox 90 supports Fetch Metadata Request Headers

blog.mozilla.org

61–70 of 109 posts

Re: Firefox 90 supports Fetch Metadata Request Headers

#61
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox, Chrome, Edge and Opera support it (including mobile). Internet Explorer is dead (ok, is a Zombie. But was supper-seeded by Edge for most users). Safari is sadly not yet supported. The nice thing is that you can employ security enhancements based on this technique even if it's not supported by all your clients. I.e. you can automatically reject requests if the headers are given and have a bad value, which wou…

Safari truly is IE in 2021

People who say this never had to develop for IE.

Re: Firefox 90 supports Fetch Metadata Request Headers

#62
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari truly is IE in 2021

This is a story that you can often hear on HN but I don't think it's correct. There were three correlated reasons for the bad reputation of IE some years ago: 1. it was largely dominant, so people thought they could develop just taking that browser in consideration 2. for the previous point, MS started to develop proprietary features (like ActiveX) 3. at a certain point its development was stopped for a long time Saf…

Right now but you can reasonably develop a website which will work in Chrome and Firefox even without testing (not talking about any supper modern features), but Safari is riddled with bugs you wouldn't expect. Recently I have encountered multiple bugs regarding svg clipping in safari. Safari 14 also broke localstorage and indexeddb it's almost funny how bad safari is at actually just working.

Re: Firefox 90 supports Fetch Metadata Request Headers

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a reproducible bug report, with an easy test case (“run this script and measure laptop battery life, in Firefox and Safari”). If you haven’t already provided that in a bug report to the software developers, you should do so. Shopping your concern to an unrelated thread about security headers isn’t likely to get far on HN, certainly nowhere near as much as a testable bug would.

Eh, I'm willing to take a few downvotes if it means raising awareness. I tag pretty much every Firefox post with some sort of report on battery life. I've added bug reports... doesn't ever seem to get taken seriously. Like I said I'm OK with taking a few downvotes on the off chance someone on the Firefox team may actually see this and be able to prioritize work to address the issue. Firefox is my primary browser, but…

"Raising awareness" by spamming your issue into unrelated posts' comments isn't really an acceptable behavior here. You need to find or write a blog post about the issues you're experiencing, and submit that to HN for independent consideration.

Re: Firefox 90 supports Fetch Metadata Request Headers

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a reproducible bug report, with an easy test case (“run this script and measure laptop battery life, in Firefox and Safari”). If you haven’t already provided that in a bug report to the software developers, you should do so. Shopping your concern to an unrelated thread about security headers isn’t likely to get far on HN, certainly nowhere near as much as a testable bug would.

Eh, I'm willing to take a few downvotes if it means raising awareness. I tag pretty much every Firefox post with some sort of report on battery life. I've added bug reports... doesn't ever seem to get taken seriously. Like I said I'm OK with taking a few downvotes on the off chance someone on the Firefox team may actually see this and be able to prioritize work to address the issue. Firefox is my primary browser, but…

Can you please not do that here? It's off topic, and even more so if you've been doing it repeatedly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Firefox 90 supports Fetch Metadata Request Headers

#65
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If site producers want to it's already pretty much impossible today. At least without some "tricks", and nothing prevents your video-downloader from just adding a header which pretend it's origin is a website. (Or more funny you inject the downloading JS code into the website in question extending it with a download functionality ;=) ).

There's a difference between only allowing that behaviour, and explicitly creating features to enable it. This sounds like Referer, but worse.

Sec-Fetch-Site: It's more like `Origin`but without actually containing the Origin instead just delivering information about if it's the same site, same origin different origin or has not origin.

This makes it much more privacy friendly then both the `Origin` and `Refer` header, it also makes it easier to user for the intended use case and in turn IMHO a strict improvement over both `Origin` and `Referer`.

Sec-Fetch-Dest, Sec-Fetch-Mode, Sec-Fetch-User: Provide a bit more context about how the request was made, while this can leak slightly more information compared to `Origin` or worse `Referer` it's still much better.

So from a privacy POV I would say this is a strict improvements.

From a functionality POV it might look like it further limits 3rd party resource re-usage but CORS already does so. And like CORS it can be circumvented by using download apps which are not your browsers or servers republishing things or similar.

I could imagine there could be some web-extensions which "extend" a website by injecting code or similar which would become harder to do with this. Through I don't know of any where there isn't a reasonable workaround.

So from what I can tell the worst thing it might do is that using `curl` for sites where you need to set a `Origin` header now also need you to set some other headers which could be annoying.

Re: Firefox 90 supports Fetch Metadata Request Headers

#66

In the example, couldn't the call from attacker.com to banking.com be thwarted by CORS headers defined by the server?

In the web, requests are made in either `cors` mode or `no-cors` mode. In `cors` mode, the `Origin` header is sent in the request. So yes, in `cors` mode the server could reject the request based on the `Origin` header. But in `no-cors` mode (the default if you do something like ` `) the `Origin` header isn't set, so CORS doesn't help defend against any attacks.

But of course, the server could reject no-cors requests, or any request missing an Origin header.

Re: Firefox 90 supports Fetch Metadata Request Headers

#67
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari truly is IE in 2021

I don’t quite understand this argument. Can you give me a couple examples of Safari holding back major parts of web design? Or is it more obscure stuff like some webGL engine? Because I use Safari specifically for privacy reasons and it also used to never trigger my fans to full speed just to play videos, like Chrome. I also have read that while Safari does tend to take longer, their implementations tend to be more p…

An an user, safari is great. Has a web developer, safari is hell.

Re: Firefox 90 supports Fetch Metadata Request Headers

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Mozilla link above: Since publication of the ESNI draft specification at the IETF, analysis has shown that encrypting only the SNI extension provides incomplete protection. As just one example: during session resumption, the Pre-Shared Key extension could, legally, contain a cleartext copy of exactly the same server name that is encrypted by ESNI. The ESNI approach would require an encrypted variant of every ext…

So it should still make attacks harder even if possible so it's a win isn't it?

Not really, since now you're stuck maintaining this broken thing, and breaking user deployments for something that isn't valuable.

Re: Firefox 90 supports Fetch Metadata Request Headers

#69

In the example, couldn't the call from attacker.com to banking.com be thwarted by CORS headers defined by the server?

In the web, requests are made in either `cors` mode or `no-cors` mode. In `cors` mode, the `Origin` header is sent in the request. So yes, in `cors` mode the server could reject the request based on the `Origin` header. But in `no-cors` mode (the default if you do something like ` `) the `Origin` header isn't set, so CORS doesn't help defend against any attacks.

Can you explain the risk with regards to no-cors requests? Like presumably an attacker requesting an image isn't scary, right? I'd think the real issue would be the attacker making credential'd requests.

Re: Firefox 90 supports Fetch Metadata Request Headers

#70

This is FUD: > Hence the banking server or generally web application servers will most likely simply execute any action received and allow the attack to launch. While these are useful headers, there are protections today via XSRF tokens to prevent these attacks that all major sites implement, so it isn’t likely your bank is vulnerable.

It's not FUD. There are protections, but csrf tokens are a workaround while these headers are more akin to proper solution. Also, it won't magically make CSRF obsolete same way Origin header and CORS didn't make CSRF obsolete, but it's another tool in the appsec toolbox.
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