tl;dr: Please enable fission.enforceBlocklistedPrefsInSubprocesses and
fission.omitBlocklistedPrefsInSubprocesses in Nightly.

Now that we have shipped Fission, we would like to disable the Spectre
mitigations (on Desktop)[0] to regain the performance cost incurred by
them. Before doing so, we are working to ensure that data present in
the content process has been evaluated for sensitivity and removed
where appropriate.

One of the items there is sensitive preference values; there are some
the content process doesn't need and that we wouldn't want to expose
to an attacker.  Here's[1] our list if you're curious, and it also
algorithmically excludes dynamically named string preferences. From
opt-in testing so far we are pretty sure this is safe to do and won't
cause problems.  But we want to expand the opt-in process before
enabling it by default.

This is because if a sensitive preference is accessed in the content
process we will crash with the name of the preference present in the
crash report.  (Not the value, just name.)  We really should not be
creating dynamically named preferences that include user data in the
name, but we know of the print.printer_ preferences so it's not out of
the question.  We don't know of any others, but to be as conservative
as possible, we are doing a staged opt-in rollout before we enable it
by default.

If you do hit one of these corner cases (and no one has so far) you
will get a content process crash, and it will submit the name of the
sensitive preference accessed in the crash report, which is restricted
behind the allowlisting that crash-stats does for user accounts to
have access to sensitive information.

Thanks for your help.
-tom


[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1707955
[1] 
https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/21e50ef42340c421c5ae2df29f2509d17339c239/modules/libpref/Preferences.cpp#5768

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