Comment by NavinF
1 day ago
WebUSB has been live in Chrome for 9 years and nothing happened. Compare to all the features that result in people getting hacked every day. Your threat model is ridiculous.
1 day ago
WebUSB has been live in Chrome for 9 years and nothing happened. Compare to all the features that result in people getting hacked every day. Your threat model is ridiculous.
Look, I find it funny that I find myself arguing on the other side of the discussion that I'm frequently on, but here is where I draw the line, and I think what is ridiculous is to think otherwise.
How many hoops Google asks you to go to install an Android app ? (Androids amounts to basically the most sandboxed environment one can have today; malware installed there can practically do _nothing_) MANY. Centralized register of apps and remote blacklisting, a lot of permission prompts, password check, and they are even literally pushing to even have a physical 24h cool-off period if you skip the centralized register.
How many hoops does Google ask you to go an allow a random website unfettered access to destroy your hardware? One. Permission. Prompt. In a bubble prompt, that barely registers above noise compared to other permission prompts browsers ask.
Of course these are two ridiculous extremes, but they exemplify the point. There is a reason a browser won't allow a random website to write over random sectors of your hard disk just because you said "accept" to a bubble-style permission prompt about wanting to "save files to your hard disk". The line has to be drawn somewhere, and allowing what basically amounts to raw access to IO ports just after a single permission prompt listing the device name is where I draw it. Any user, even knowledgeable ones, is simply going to be _incapable_ of truly understanding the risks behind allowing this access.
I would be much more in favor of allowing random IPC to services in your local computer (after a permission prompt) than this., something that is equally useful if not more than allow raw access to HID.
Devices need to be hidden behind drivers that multiplex and control access to the device at the OS level. A bus that was never meant to be exposed to user-level access should not be exposed to random programs much less websites. This is not security, this is "mistake prevention" level, in the same way operating systems disallow a random user-level program from overwriting the hard disk.
And do not read this as "devices should sign their firmwares and what not". That is (for me) definitely the wrong take but literally the only take that is left on the table due to Google's stupid behavior.
> How many hoops Google asks you to go to install an Android app ? (Androids amounts to basically the most sandboxed environment one can have today; malware installed there can practically do _nothing_) MANY. Centralized register of apps and remote blacklisting, a lot of permission prompts, password check, and they are even literally pushing to even have a physical 24h cool-off period if you skip the centralized register.
I 'member (and miss) the old Android days before everything became the locked down hellscape Android is these days. And I also member why it became that way, there was a loooot of bad actors exploiting that open model.
For operating systems it's similar. DOS/Windows up to and through ME didn't have the concept of different user levels, the file system didn't allow for it, and if you had physical access to the machine it was trivial to corrupt and subvert it. Only with Windows XP, Microsoft switched the consumer OS to NT and its multi-user model.
And so it will be for WebUSB et al. First it will be a pretty open and unrestricted world, and only if there turns out to be a significant problem, security will (need to) be tightened.