Contact emails

miketa...@chromium.org, awil...@chromium.org

Explainer

None yet.

Specification

https://fetch.spec.whatwg.org/#http-cache-partitions

Summary

We aim to experiment with utilizing the initiator site when caching the
responses of cross-site navigations in the HTTP cache. This experiment is
intended to test a potential mitigation for cross-site leak attacks in
which an attacker can initiate a top-level navigation to a given page and
then navigate to a resource known to be loaded by the page in order to
infer sensitive information via load timing. The tested mitigation is also
intended as a privacy improvement since it will make it more difficult for
a malicious site to use navigations to infer whether a user has visited a
given site previously.

Blink component

Internals>Network>Cache
<https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list?q=component%3AInternals%3ENetwork%3ECache&can=2>

TAG review

Not requested yet.

Risks
Interoperability and Compatibility

We do not expect compatibility impacts here, but there may be some
performance implications. Safari and Firefox currently ship some notion of
partitioned HTTP caches. We will seek their input once we have a better
idea of the tradeoffs between security/privacy and performance.

Gecko: No signal requested yet.

WebKit: No signal requested yet.

Web developers: No signals

WebView application risks

Does this intent deprecate or change behavior of existing APIs, such that
it has potentially high risk for Android WebView-based applications?

No

Goals for experimentation

We would like to run a 1% stable experiment to understand the performance
implications of several approaches to implementing this HTTP cache security
improvement. We expect 6 weeks to be sufficient for analysis, beginning in
M129, but are requesting permission to run from M129 to M131 inclusive in
case we run into any delays.

The approaches we’d like to experiment with are:

   -

   Adding a boolean value to the HTTP cache key that is set to true for
   top-level navigations to a URL that is cross-site from the initiator site
   of the navigation



   -

   Adding the initiator site into the HTTP cache key for top-level
   navigations to a URL that is cross-site from the initiator site of the
   navigation. If the initiator has an opaque origin (for instance, if the
   initiating page was loaded from a data: URL or is a sandboxed iframe) then
   no caching of the navigation response will occur.

   -

   Adding the initiator site into the HTTP cache key for all navigations
   (including subframe navigations) in the same way as the previous approach.
   With this scheme we’d also replace use of an existing HTTP cache key
   component (called the “is-subframe-document-resource” boolean, set to true
   for all subframe navigations) designed to mitigate related attacks from
   malicious subframes. This scheme is expected to have similar performance
   characteristics to the previous approach but would make Chromium’s handling
   of main frame and subframe navigations consistent.


Incorporating the initiator into the HTTP cache key will mean that the
responses from renderer-initiated navigations will not be re-used across
contexts with different frame sites or top-frame sites. This could affect
the page load times for previously visited sites in cases where loading a
page over the network is slower than loading the page from the local disk
cache. Renderer-initiated navigations corresponding to, for example,
clicking links on a site, site redirects, and link prefetches that use
“as=’document’”. Incorporating the ‘is-cross-site-top-level-navigation’
boolean is expected to have the least impact on performance since it allows
the most amount of response re-use. Incorporating the full initiator site
is expected to have the most impact since there is less re-use with these
cache partitioning schemes, but this approach may enable future HTTP cache
performance optimizations that are not possible today due to cross-site
leak risks.

Debuggability

No special needs.

Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac,
Linux, ChromeOS, Android, and Android WebView)?

No

All except WebView, which does not currently partition its HTTP cache.

Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests
<https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/testing/web_platform_tests.md>
?

No

Flag name on chrome://flags

None

Finch feature name

There are several feature flags, one per experiment partition key format:

   -

   SplitCacheByCrossSiteMainFrameNavigationBoolean - Enables use of the
   is-cross-site-navigation boolean in the HTTP cache key for main frame
   navigations with cross-site initiators

   -

   SplitCacheByMainFrameNavigationInitiator - Enables use of the initiator
   site in the HTTP cache key for main frame navigations with cross-site
   initiators

   -

   SplitCacheByNavigationInitiator - Enables use of the initiator site in
   the HTTP cache key for all navigations with cross-site initiators and
   disables use of the existing “is-subframe-document-resource” boolean.


Requires code in //chrome?

To facilitate conducting the experiment we have code to clear chrome’s HTTP
cache when the experiment is conducted, but otherwise no code in //chrome
is needed.

Estimated milestones

M129 to M131 inclusive.

Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status

https://chromestatus.com/feature/5190577638080512
<https://chromestatus.com/feature/5190577638080512?gate=5181053938171904>

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