On Fedora Workstation, GNOME, Epiphany, and WebKitGTK
DuckDuckGo bangs are just shortcuts to redirect your search to another search engine. My personal favorites:
There’s 6388 more, but those are the three I can remember. If you work on GNOME or WebKit, these are super convenient.
A follow up of my previous post: in response to my letter, NIST is going to increase the CVSS score of CVE-2013-2566 (RC4) to match CVE-2011-3389 (BEAST). Yay!
In other news, WebKitGTK+ 2.8 has full support for RFC 7465. That’s a fancy way of saying that we will no longer negotiate RC4 connections and you will now be unable to access the small minority of HTTPS sites that offer nothing but RC4. Hopefully other browsers will follow along sooner rather than later. In particular, Firefox nightly has stopped negotiating RC4 except for a few whitelisted sites: I would very much like to see that whitelist removed. Internet Explorer has stopped negotiating RC4 except when it performs voluntary protocol version fallback. It would be great to see a firmer stance from Mozilla and Microsoft, and some action from Google and Apple.
I’ve laid out some informal thoughts on where we should be heading with regards to new security and privacy features in Epiphany. It’s in the form of a list of features we really ought to have. (That is, it’s a wishlist.) Most of these features would be implemented in WebKitGTK+, so other applications using WebKitGTK+ would benefit as well.
There’s certainly no shortage of work to be done, so except for a couple items on the list, this is not a list of things you should expect to be implemented soon. Comments welcome on the wiki or on this blog. Volunteers especially welcome! Most of these tasks on the list would make for great GSoC projects (but I’m not accepting more applicants this year: prospective students should find another mentor who’s interested in one of the tasks).
The list will also be used to help assign one or more bounties using some of the money we raised in our 2013 security and privacy campaign.
It’s already been a few weeks since the release of GNOME Web 3.14, so it’s a bit late to blog about the changes it brings, but better late than never. Unlike 3.12, this release doesn’t contain big user interface changes, so the value of the upgrade may not be as immediately clear as it was for 3.12. But this release is still a big step forward: the focus this cycle has just been on polish and safety instead of UI changes. Let’s take a look at some of the improvements since 3.12.1.
The most important changes help keep you safer when browsing the web.
When you try to connect securely to a web site (via HTTPS), the site presents identification in the form of a chain of digital certificates to prove that your connection has not been maliciously intercepted. If the last certificate in the chain is not signed by one of the certificates your browser has on file, the browser decides that the connection is not secure: this could be a harmless server configuration error, but it could also be an attacker intercepting your connection. (To be precise, your connection would be secure, but it would be a secure connection to an attacker.) Previously, Web would bet on the former, displaying an insecure lock icon next to the address in the header bar, but loading the page anyway. The problem with this approach is that if there really is an attacker, simply loading the page gives the attacker access to secure cookies, most notably the session cookies used to keep you logged in to a particular web site. Once the attacker controls your session, he can trick the web site into thinking he’s you, change your settings, perhaps make purchases with your account if you’re on a shopping site, for example. Moreover, the lock icon is hardly noticeable enough to warn the user of danger. And let’s face it, we all ignore those warnings anyway, right? Web 3.14 is much stricter: once it decides that an attacker may be in control of a secure connection, it blocks access to the page, like all major browsers already do:
(The white text on the button is probably a recent compatibility issue with GTK+ master: it’s fine in 3.14.)
Safety team members will note that this will obviously break sites with self-signed certificates, and is incompatible with a trust-on-first-use approach to certificate validation. As much as I agree that the certificate authority system is broken and provides only a moderate security guarantee, I’m also very skeptical of trust-on-first-use. We can certainly discuss this further, but it seemed best to start off with an approach similar to what major browsers already do.
The Load Anyway button is non-ideal, since many users will just click it, but this provides good protection for anyone who doesn’t. So, why don’t we get rid of that Load Anyway button? Well, different browsers have different strategies for validating TLS certificates (a good topic for a future blog post), which is why Web sometimes claims a connection is insecure even though Firefox loads the page fine. If you think this may be the case, and you don’t care about the security of your connection (including any passwords you use on the site), then go ahead and click the button. Needless to say, don’t do this if you’re using somebody else’s Wi-Fi access point, or on an email or banking or shopping site… when you use this button, the address in the address bar does not matter: there’s no telling who you’re really connected to.
But all of the above only applies to your main connection to a web site. When you load a web page, your browser actually creates very many connections to grab subresources (like images, CSS, or trackers) needed to display the page. Prior to 3.14, Web would completely ignore TLS errors for subresources. This means that the secure lock icon was basically worthless, since an attacker could control the page by modifying any script loaded by the page without being detected. (Fortunately, this attack is somewhat unlikely, since major browsers would all block this.) Web 3.14 will verify all TLS certificates used to encrypt subresources, and will block those resources if verification fails. This can cause web pages to break unexpectedly, but it’s how all major browsers I’ve tested behave, and it’s certainly the right thing to do. (We may want to experiment with displaying a warning, though, so that it’s clear what’s gone wrong.)
And if you’re a distributor, please read this mail to learn how not to break TLS verification in your distribution. I’m looking at you, Debian and derivatives.
With glib-networking 2.42, corresponding to GNOME 3.14, Web will now accept certificate chains when the certificates are sent out of order. Sites that do this are basically broken, but all major browsers nevertheless support unordered chains. Sending certificates out of order is a harmless configuration mistake, not a security flaw, so the only harm in accepting unordered certificates is that this makes sites even less likely than before to notice their configuration mistake, harming TLS clients that don’t permute the certificates.
This change should greatly reduce the number of TLS verification failures you experience when using Web. Unfortunately, there are still too many differences in how certificate verification is performed for me to be comfortable with removing the Load Anyway button, but that is definitely the long-term goal.
WebKitGTK+ 2.6.1 plugs a serious HTTP authentication vulnerability. Previously, when a secure web page would require a password before the user could load the page, Web would not validate the page’s TLS certificate until after prompting the user for a password and sending it to the server.
If a secure (HTTPS) web page displays insecure content (usually an image or video) or executes an insecure script, Web now displays a warning icon instead of a lock icon. This means that the lock icon now indicates that your connection is completely private, with the exception that a passive adversary can always know the web site that you are visiting (but not which page you are visiting on the site). If the warning icon is displayed, then an adversary can compromise some (and possibly all) of the page, and has also learned something that might reveal which page of the site you are visiting, or the contents of the page.
If you’re curious where the insecure content is coming from and don’t mind leaving behind Web’s normally simple user interface, you can check using the web inspector:
The focus on safety will continue to drive the development of Web 3.16. Most major browsers, with the notable exception of Safari, take mixed content detection one step further by actively blocking some more dangerous forms of insecure content, such as scripts, on secure pages, and we certainly intend to do so as well. We’re also looking into support for strict transport security (HSTS), to ensure that your connection to HSTS-enabled sites is safe even if you tried to connect via HTTP instead of HTTPS. This is what you normally do when you type an address into the address bar. Many sites will redirect you from an HTTP URL to an HTTPS URL, but an attacker isn’t going to do this kindness for you. Since all HTTP pages are insecure, you get no security warning. This problem is thwarted by strict transport security. We’re currently hoping to have both mixed content blocking and strict transport security complete in time for 3.16.
Of course, security hasn’t been the only thing we’ve been working on.
3.14 also contains some notable bugfixes that will improve your browsing experience.
These issues have all been backported to our 3.12 branch, but were never released. We’ll need to consider making more frequent stable releases, to ensure that bugfixes reach users more quickly in the future.
As always, the best place to send feedback is <epiphany-list@gnome.org>, or Bugzilla if you’ve found a bug. Comments on this post work too. Happy browsing!