Victor Probo wrote:

>   Can you be a bit more specific about the definition of "disable PSM"?
> Can you point to any API documentation for this PSM capability? I have 
> been surprised about private features of the PSM twice now in 2 weeks. 
> One would hope that all of this would be up front, to instill trust.

I can't be sure about what Christian was talking about, but...

I imagine that, if certain http headers are sent with a secure page 
(e.g. cache: no-store or similar), that PSM won't store form data, 
because the webserver in question is basically asking it not to.

If Moz (or any other web browser that remembers form data, e.g. MSIE) 
were to store that data, then it would be relatively easy for other 
(potentially malicious) people to get at that data in certain 
circumstances.  Most of those circumstances involve you being dumb in 
some obvious or obscure way, but even uber-super-users make dumb 
mistakes sometimes.

If that form data contains, for example, your credit card details, or 
your password to your online banking facility, that one dumb mistake 
could cost you a substantial amount of money.  Many users, in that 
situation, would probably blame the bank (since all the user knows is 
that loads of money disappeared from their account, with no idea of how 
it happened)  Banks don't like this sort of thing happening.  Therefore, 
they want to be able to tell web browsers not to cache certain pages in 
ANY WAY WHATSOEVER.

They will lock browsers out of sites if they don't meet these criteria.

This isn't a "secret deal" between the banks and mozilla to make your 
life difficult.  It's the banks saying "unless your browser does this, 
this and this, we're not letting it in to our site, because it won't be 
as secure as we want it to be".  And the banks, mostly, want it *SECURE*

-- 
gav


Reply via email to