libseed-list Security overview

[Michael Terry <michael terry canonical com>]

Hello, gentle Seed developers!

I do work on the Ubuntu desktop team and am looking into getting seed 
into the main archive so that it can ship with Ubuntu 11.10 as part of 
GNOME 3 [1].

Part of that process is a security review and this comment was made by 
Kees Cook, a member of the security team:

"""
Yikes, javascript hooked to the desktop. :) There's nothing immediately 
wrong with the code, but I have to wonder about how security boundaries 
are going to be enforced, if JS from the browser ever touches JS for the 
desktop. I would prefer to see documentation similar to the "same 
origin" policies in browsers for how JS will be used in the Desktop 
before this package goes into main.
"""

Maybe my Google-fu is weak, but I couldn't find discussions of seed 
security or XSS issues.  Though apparently it has some support for 
sandboxing?

Also in general with seed, who is responsible for enforcing or 
activating security protections?  Like, do Gedit plugins have to 
specifically ask seed to use sandboxing or whatever?  (i.e. do we just 
have to worry about seed screwing up, or do we also have to look at all 
users of seed?)

Thanks!

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/seed/+bug/782972

-mt