Sending this with a new subject as I think my comments could have been better placed.
I have one nit with these documents - the way they bring Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) into the discussion and positions X-Frame-Options as a "sometimes" mitigation for CSRF. We could probably agree that wording such as "In some forms of Clickjacking and CSRF an attacker tricks a user into clicking..." sufficiently limits the scope of the context. However I feel that CSRF in general is just completely out of scope - there are many attacks that might leverage framing after all. I also worry that some people may be led to believe that the X-Frame-Options header provides general protection from CSRF when that's absolutely not the case. When Microsoft released this functionality with IE8, it was positioned as a protection against framing attacks, or Clickjacking, and not CSRF. I believe that's how many of us in the security community still view it - it's only a protection against CSRF in cases where framing is required to execute the CSRF attack. The two (Clickjacking and CSRF) can only be linked in that and similar contexts. I suggest that references to CSRF protection be removed to avoid confusion or that the wording reflect this narrow scope of the CSRF-protection (preferably the former). After all, CSRF is just one example of many other attacks that could leverage framing - e.g. we could include answering CAPTCHAs, certain forms of self-side XSS, and even information disclosure as equivalent forms of attack (like CSRF) that might leverage framing. Can we keep the documents focused on the primary design goal - controlling/preventing framing - and avoid lumping in other forms of attack that might piggyback on such framing? Best regards, Chris Weber _______________________________________________ websec mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/websec
