Re: Extensions Infrastructure Work

[Olav Vitters <olav vitters nl>]

On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 03:39:19PM -0400, Jasper St. Pierre wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 3:27 PM, Olav Vitters <olav vitters nl> wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 07:12:53PM -0400, Jasper St. Pierre wrote:
> >> As I played around with it, I found the HTTP approach more feasible
> >> and less ugly than the mimetype handler approach. At first I figured
> >> the idea of running a local HTTP server would be a bit ugly, and Owen
> >> thought of some security concerns, but there's nothing too critical
> >> (or unsolvable) that I know of. The only "ugly" thing from a code
> >> perspective is that there's a magic port number: 16269. It's not on
> >> the IANA Registered Ports list, so I doubt there's going to be a
> >> collision.
> >
> > Won't that break down in two cases:
> > 1. Proxy set in the browser
> >   User/sysadmin has to explicitly exclude localhost from being proxied
> 
> I'm unsure how or why localhost would be proxied. If it's some DNS
> quirk would 127.0.0.1 get around it? If not, is this something we can
> put in the sysadmin documentation?

Why not? If you put in a proxy setting, everything is proxied, including
localhost, 127.0.0.1, etc. The browser will just connect to the proxy
machine (which is pretty handy btw).

I don't know what the default for 'do not proxy for' is in the various
browsers, but I know I make use of the fact that localhost is proxied.

> > 2. Multiple users or sessions on the same machine
> >   Only the first session can use it.
> 
> My idea was that log-out would stop the HTTP daemon for that session
> and open one for the current user. Unless there's a special case (I
> didn't think of virt) where two users can be securely both actively
> having GNOME sessions at the same time, I don't think this is a
> problem. The only security issue I can think of that arises out of
> this compromise is that a user could ssh in to the same machine and
> frob the HTTP server to... install, enable/disable and list extensions
> from the official GNOME3 site.

That does not seem ideal. If I give someone access to my machine, I
don't want them being able to change anything belonging to my account. I
don't care if it is only official extensions. I just don't think it
should be possible.

> I assume there's no magic way to tie a TCP socket to a user's session
> (paging Dr. Lennart Poettering)

-- 
Regards,
Olav