For ES5, this is a tempest in a teapot.
We at Mozilla are trying to remove assignable __proto__ in a near-term
release, except in these two useful and (AFAIK) safe cases:
* A newborn with no other properties.
* A recent-born in the midst of initialization via evaluation of its
object initialiser syntax, where the baby object can't escape, can't
be referenced to make a cycle, etc.
We really don't want to continue supporting mutating __proto__ in
other cases. Assignable __proto__ is a hugely expensive operation that
breaks all sorts of optimizations, requiring fairly expensive
deoptimization effort.
ES5's Object.create relieves the need for any of this, but legacy code
won't be rewritten all at once, so we're probably going to support the
above two bulleted cases.
The idea that the ES5 spec suddenly makes the world more secure by
trying circuitously to address old extensions such as __proto__ seems
optimistic to me. Better to get rid of the offending extension than
try to fence it while not speaking its (I mean ES-unspecififed
__proto__'s) name.
But this is a job for implementors, not the spec. Implementors jumped
in when the standards process stalled after ES3. Blame them for
trying, or failing to design high-integrity APIs, but it's all spilled
milk. They need to clean it up, 'sall (I say this as one of "them").
The bigger picture must involve implementations as well as the spec,
and de-facto standards that may precede de-jure replacements or
adoptions of de-facto standards. It isn't as if ES5 is the last time
there will be a de-facto mess to clean up, although members of the
committee are making good promises and progress in sharing intentions
and prototypes. I suspect we'll see some de-facto stuff come out of
one or two vendors who aren't active in TC39 (Apple, Google V8).
Beyond this point, implementations will have bugs, whether in would-be
de-facto extensions to the standard, or in standardized components --
forever. Attempts to inject security by code transformations (which of
course can themselves be buggy) will simply have to try to work around
browser JS engine bugs.
Security is never done, because it consists of end-to-end and many-
layers property enforcement problems, where the evolving system and
economic scarcity mean the bad guys always have a new layer or middle-
man that's under-defended to attack. Denning said this in her 1999
Infosec award speech, and it seems unassailable, even if it outrages
some of my academic research friends.
Better JS security will have to come from the browsers fixing bugs and
breaking compatibility, where the alternative is an ongoing security
hazard that's actually exploited. When it comes to both bad old
default security policies, and some of the extensions added over the
years, I say: break the web, or at least bend it! My new mantra.
Shocking, I know, but with minority-share browsers now getting close
to modern-IE by-version market share, isn't it time?
/be
On Jun 15, 2009, at 8:28 PM, Allen Wirfs-Brock wrote:
On the surface, this seems fairly reasonable., of course IE doesn’t
have any skin in the mutable __proto__ game.
Would you really associate this with Object.freeze or would you make
it a characteristic of the [[Extensible]] internal property being
false? Personally, I’d probably be inclined to go with the latter.
My one concern also relates to you other message concerning
debugging APIs. Does no modification of [[Prototype]] really mean
never. I certainly can envision debugger APIs or other support for
incremental/evolutionary development tools that could make use of a
mutable [[Prototype]] (as well as mutability of other immutable
states such as a false [[Extensible]] internal property) . I’m
quite happy to agree that these items should not be directly mutable
from the internal perspective of an application program but I’m less
willing to agree that a “privileged” tooling API (including possibly
a mirrors reflection based API) could never mutate such state.
From: es-discuss-boun...@mozilla.org [mailto:es-discuss-boun...@mozilla.org
] On Behalf Of Mark S. Miller
Sent: Monday, June 15, 2009 7:52 PM
To: es-discuss; es5-disc...@mozilla.org
Subject: Another de-facto insecurity we need to fix in ES5
As I just mentioned on the debugging API thread, at the last
EcmaScript meeting we agreed
On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 5:11 PM, Waldemar Horwat
<walde...@google.com> wrote:
Rather than describing the evil things that implementations do with
F.caller, we agreed to just impose a blanket prohibition of code
peeking into the environment records or identity of strict functions
on the stack. This way a test suite can ensure that F.caller does
nnot reveal strict functions without us having to introduce the evil
things into the standard. I'll write up proposed wording.
This is an example of a more general principle. The language we're
evolving from isn't ES3, it's ES3 as currently practiced. When
browser vendors implement ES5, they won't actually implement ES5 as
speced. They will implement ES5 as extended to preserve some of the
defacto practices they currently support. When these likely future
defacto extensions would lose some of the integrity or security
gains we're trying to achieve with ES5, then we should find an
adjustment to the ES5 spec that does not break these defacto
practices for old code but still allows new code to defend itself
from attackers using these defacto extensions.
The ES3 and ES5 specs both specify the implicit [[Prototype]]
property as something that is initialized once and then unchanged.
All major browsers today but IE alias this to the name
"__proto__" (as if that's a named property) and allow it to be
mutated. None of the rest of the ES5 semantics has been critically
examined in light of the possibility that an implementation may
allow this mutation. So long as [[Prototype]] is pervasively
mutable, then most interesting behavior of an ES5 object won't be
stable as well. I recommend:
Object.freeze(foo) guarantees not only that all of foo's named
properties be frozen and that foo is non-extensible, but also that
foo's [[Prototype]] will not be changed.
For non-frozen objects, we continue not to specify that
[[Prototype]] can be mutated or explain any means for mutating it.
But neither can we prohibit such mutations unless FF, Safari, and
Opera are willing to give up this feature. The proposal above won't
break any old code that depends on mutating __proto__ but will
enable new code to protect itself. I would like to propose something
stronger, but don't know of anything stronger compatible with this
constraint.
--
Cheers,
--MarkM
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