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PING Comments On Mitigation Strategies #44

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merged 49 commits into from
Dec 3, 2018

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jasonanovak
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Collective feedback from PING on the mitigation strategies section of the questionnaire.

jasonanovak and others added 30 commits October 14, 2018 11:27
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@@ -610,6 +610,11 @@ <h2 id="mitigations">
Mitigation Strategies
</h2>

To mitigate the security and privacy risks you’ve identified in your
specification as you’ve filled out the questionnaire and consulted with PING,
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This is possibly not a good idea, since we're again suggesting a soft requirement-like for consulting with PING (where in case of a TAG review, for example, we refrained from that. Let's simplify possibly?

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Sure.

As per the comment on the commit. I do not feel it breaks anything at it is already clear by now that consultations are encouraged.
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privacy engineering practices. Examples
* [BATTERY-STATUS-API] <em>“The user agent should not expose high
precision readouts”</em>
* [SENSORS-API] <em>“Limit maximum sampling frequency”, “Reduce accuracy”</em>
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Are there any more (possibly)?

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I've filed an issue to track finding more for a future version: w3cping#16

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that file's parent directory and its contents as that is clearly not what is
expected.

Basic fingerprinting guidance can be found here.
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Why fingerprinting in this place? I see no connection (in the writeup).

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Reference from incorporating another document into this one. Removed with w3cping@ea8d5ac.

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requirements in their Device API Privacy Requirements document.

* APIs must make it easy to request as little information as required for
the intended usage. For instance, an API call should require specific
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We can simply link to this document, or provide the long quotes in an annex or so (we already got some feedback about the document being lengthy)

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Should be addressed by w3cping@062d592 now.

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reveals a user's location, and wouldn't be particularly useful if it didn't;
If the security or privacy risk of a feature cannot otherwise be mitigated in
a specification, optionally allowing an implementer to prompt a user may
provide the best security/privacy possible. If the specification does not
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I'm not sure if I feel comfortable with saying that this 'may provide the best ... possible'. For example consider the AOM model where this would still result in risks.

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Revised with w3cping@b81de7d to make clear that it is an option and it reduced but does not remove risk.

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It is possible that the risk of a feature cannot be mitigated because the
risk is endemic to the feature itself. For instance, [[ GEOLOCATION-API ]]
reveals a user’s location, and wouldn’t be particularly useful if it didn’t;
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Today I would argue that it would be useful if providing course location details + information on precision. Should we change this part of the text not to endorse the default behavior of geolocation?

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Revised with w3cping@6420040 to make clear this is about how the geolocation api works rather than opining on it.

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the user may choose to accept. This risk is also present and should be
accounted for in features that expose personal data or identifiers.

Designing such prompts is difficult as is determining the duration and timing
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It will be unclear for the reader what we mean by 'timing'. Do we really need this?

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Revised with w3cping@db29182.

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Every feature in a spec should be considered guilty (of harming security
and/or privacy) until proven otherwise.
of a feature is to drop the feature.
Every feature in a spec should be considered guilty of harming security
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Maybe we should rephrase (in the end) the guilt part to risk part

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Addressed with w3cping@4707eac


Specifications that expose such sensitive data should include a
recommendation that websites and applications adopting the API — but not
necessarily the implementing user agent — conduct a privacy impact assessment
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What do we mean by "not necessarily the implementing UA"? Why are we adding this?

@@ -5,6 +5,7 @@ <h1>Self-Review Questionnaire: Security and Privacy</h1>
Shortname: security-privacy-questionnaire
Level: 1
Editor: Lukasz Olejnik, Independent researcher, [email protected]
Editor: Jason Novak, Apple Inc., https://apple.com
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Erm, do you have a mail or a site? Otherwise, should I edit out my mail to my site? Asking on consistency.

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I've seen folks put either a site or an email.... I went with site.

@lknik
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lknik commented Dec 3, 2018

Looks good to me.

@lknik lknik merged commit 59238c8 into w3ctag:master Dec 3, 2018
@hober hober deleted the week-04-mitigation-strategies branch June 9, 2020 20:48
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3 participants