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0 pointsAjedi325y ago0 comments

Developers not understanding CORS is simply all the more reason why it's good that CORS defaults to secure behavior whenever possible. The harder you make it for ignorant developers to shoot themselves (and their users) in the foot, the better.

postMessage's API design has similar issues to WebSockets. MDN does a pretty good job of explaining the dangers (practically every other paragraph on the page for postMessage contains a warning in bold text about properly validating the origin argument), but I think it would have been far better if the API forced devs to explicitly specify which origins they want to receive events from up front rather than relying on them to check the origin themselves after the message is received. I have little doubt there will be numerous vulnerabilities instigated by the current API design, despite MDN's warnings.

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chrisfosterelli5y ago

> Developers not understanding CORS is simply all the more reason why it's good that CORS defaults to secure behavior whenever possible. The harder you make it for ignorant developers to shoot themselves (and their users) in the foot, the better.

Right, but not understanding something doesn't mean it is more difficult to shoot yourself in the foot -- in fact it's the opposite. The zoom vulnerability is an example of this, or every developer that just imports `cors()` middleware and runs it because "otherwise it gives some CORS error".

I'd rather an approach that is simple to understand, gives flexibility to the developers, and makes it crystal clear to them what their responsibilities are.

Ajedi32OP5y ago

I'm not trying to saying that CORS is harder to shoot yourself in the foot with because it's hard to understand. Rather, it's harder to shoot yourself in the foot with because not understanding it usually just means your site's pages aren't accessible to other origins at all. (That's one reason why so many developers seem to have so much trouble with it; rather than breaking their site's security and remaining completely unaware of it, they instead break their site's functionality instead and need to spend a bunch of "extra" time learning about CORS and the same origin policy before they can get it to work.)

In contrast, not understanding WebSockets usually means your WebSocket endpoints are completely insecure, with no indication that anything is wrong and no incentive to learn more because "it's already working".

Obviously secure-by-default is not completely foolproof. After all, defaults are, by definition, possible to change. But if developers are going to shoot themselves in the foot, I'd much rather them be forced to do so explicitly than have it happen to them implicitly without any action on their part.

chrisfosterelli5y ago

I see what you're saying and agree with the fundamentals. I think we disagree on this assumption:

> they instead break their site's functionality and need to spend a bunch of "extra" time learning about CORS and the same origin policy before they can get it to work

In my experience, a very large percentage of developers don't do this. They try that, then find it confusing, and they only estimated two days for this task, which is already late, so they just sort out enough to get it to work. For most cases, this is importing `cors()` and passing it in as middleware. The easiest config... and also the one that makes your site available to all origins.

At the end of the day it will always come down to developer education. Someone will make something easy to use. So we might as well make it really simple to use and understand, so that it's easier to educate the right way to build things.

perl4ever5y ago

The last time I was getting annoyed with CORS preventing me from doing something, I wrote a VBA script that opened IE, loaded a random page from the site that was clashing, and injected javascript to do what I wanted.

...and I don't even have admin access to my own computer.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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chrisfosterelli5y ago

I'd rather an approach that is simple to understand, gives flexibility to the developers, and makes it crystal clear to them what their responsibilities are.

Ajedi32OP5y ago

chrisfosterelli5y ago

I see what you're saying and agree with the fundamentals. I think we disagree on this assumption:

> they instead break their site's functionality and need to spend a bunch of "extra" time learning about CORS and the same origin policy before they can get it to work

perl4ever5y ago

...and I don't even have admin access to my own computer.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse