Subject: [rtcweb] Security and browser/screen access

From: Randell Jesup <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 25 Sep 2011 17:48:19 -0400

This is an issue that impacts at a usecase we've been discussing: access to the
browser or screen bitmap is inherently very risky, security-wise.

See Robert O'Callahan's blog post triggered by discussions of these usecases at
our recent Mozilla All-Hands:
http://robert.ocallahan.org/2011/08/securing-full-screen.html

This directly affects use-cases like WebEx (of course), remote assistance, etc.
We've glossed the security side of those so far.

Note that these use-cases replace desktop or plugin installs which implicitly gave
the provider access to far more than just the screen, so from that perspective
screen access is actually a reduction in exposure.  However, there's a definitive
decision (whether well-informed or not) to install these apps, and most of them
(not all!) don't auto-update without asking; and you can un-install them.

This once again as I've mentioned in some other cases wanders into the same territory
as WebApp installation, which we also talked about looking at for handling "ongoing
permissions" for camera/mic for services similar to Skype - tie it to a user "install".
Whether that's good enough, and how that actually works are good questions.

-- 
Randell Jesup
[email-masked]

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From: Harald Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2011 10:02:35 +0200

> We've glossed the security side of those so far.
This also is something that affects the W3 side of things more than it 
affects the IETF side of things; can I encourage people to join the W3C 
WEBRTC mailing list and take those discussions there?
> Whether that's good enough, and how that actually works are good 
Fully agree on the situation description.