Hello All,

I'd like to propose to give WebActivity higher integrity than now
because it will be key factor of apps communication on FxOS.

Currently both of the sender and the receiver might have doubt that the
peer differs from apps expected. At least the receiver (usually high
privileged) should provide sensitive information only if the sender is
reliable. Here I will show some use case:

1.      Receiver confirmation
The sender is a SNS app. It occasionally wants to record a new contact
but does not have permission to access the DB, so that the sender invoke
an activity, which name could be 'moz.contact.org/register'. Any app
including malicious one can register a handler for the name. User will
see a list of receivers but he may make bad choice because of lack of
caution.

2.      Sender confirmation
The receiver is an agent of single-sign-on authentication and wants to
allow accesses only from pre-registered apps. With WebActivity, however,
there are no ways to identify the sender. In the web, a site could keep
secret key on its server and authentication is preceded on the secret
but this mechanism does not work with installed apps because all sources
are exposed.

These issues are solved if WebActivity has an option to set the receiver
when it is invoked and has the sender information when it is passed to
the receiver. As the identity for the option and the information
manifest URL seems suitable.  I don't think to make another API for the
above purpose. To keep existing codes working the functionality should
be provided as an option.

I'm happy if you take a consideration on this topic and give any response.

Junichi Hashimoto


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