Client Security

This document is intended to give an overview of the security considerations which must be kept in mind when working on the Hypothesis client. It outlines the overall security goals for the client, names some risks and attack vectors, and identifies ways in which code in the client attempts to mitigate those risks.

Environment Overview

The Hypothesis client is a single-page web application which runs in a browser. Typically, it interacts with some annotated content (the page on which annotations are made) and an annotation service running on a remote server.

At different times, users interact directly with the client, with the annotated content, and with the annotation service. Data can flow in both directions: from the annotated content to the client and vice versa. Communication with the annotation service is also bidirectional, making use of an HTTP API and a WebSocket connection:

                .─.
               (   )
              .─`─'─.
             ; User  :
       ┌─────:       ;──────┬────────────────────┐
       │      \     /       │                    │
       │       `───'        │                    │
       │                    │                    │
       v                    v                    v
┌────────────┐   *   ╔════════════╗       ┌────────────┐
│            │   *   ║            ║       │            │
│            │   *   ║            ║ HTTP  │            │
│ Annotated  │──────>║   Client   ║──────>│ Annotation │
│  content   │<──────║            ║<──────│  service   │
│            │   *   ║            ║  WS   │            │
│            │   *   ║            ║       │            │
└────────────┘   *   ╚════════════╝       └────────────┘

There are two important trust boundaries in this system:

  1. Between the client code, executing in a browser, and the service, executing on a remote server.

  2. Between the annotated content (which may be an HTML page or a PDF rendered as an HTML page) and the client application. This boundary is marked with asterisks (*) in the ASCII art above.

Threat Model

We are principally interested in ensuring that untrusted parties cannot gain access to data that is intended to be confidential, or tamper with such data when it is in transit. Protected data might include:

  • user credentials

  • annotation data or metadata which is displayed by the client

  • user profile information

  • group membership records

  • user search history

We must assume that the user has a baseline level of trust in:

  1. their browser software (and the platform it runs on)

  2. our client software

  3. the annotation service

  4. any 3rd-party account provider mediating access to the annotation service (e.g. Google, Facebook, etc.)

Any other parties are considered untrusted. Untrusted actors thus include any and all of the following:

  • the publishers of arbitrary web pages (including annotated content)

  • advertisers or other 3rd-party contributors to arbitrary web pages (including annotated content)

  • other users of the annotation service who have not been explicitly designated as trusted (through group membership, for example)

  • members of the public who don’t use the annotation service

  • active attackers

We aim to defend confidential user data against any possibility of unauthorised access.

Potential Attack Vectors

The mechanisms of directed attack we are aiming to defend against are common to many web applications, namely:

  • execution of untrusted code in a trusted context (principally by XSS)

  • clickjacking

  • phishing/imitation attacks

  • eavesdropping of unencrypted network traffic by an untrusted party

  • to a limited extent, cross-site request forgery, although this is mostly a concern for the annotation service

Design Considerations and Defenses

Same-Origin Policy Protections

The starting point for understanding many of the client-side security mechanisms is the web platform’s same-origin policy (SOP), which ensures that any document on origin 1 “A” has very limited access to the execution context or DOM tree of any document on a different origin “B”.

../_images/security-sop.png

Fig. 1 Distinct origins for annotated content and client application

As shown in Fig. 1, the bulk of the Hypothesis client application executes within an <iframe> injected into the annotated content. This <iframe> has an origin distinct from that of the hosting page, which means that most of the protections of the SOP apply. Most importantly, code executing in the context of the annotated page cannot inspect the DOM of the client frame. The red border in the image is a visual representation of the trust boundary between the inherently untrusted execution context of the annotated page, and the trusted execution context of the client frame.

Instead, the components of the client which execute in the annotated page must communicate with the client frame using cross-document messaging. It is important that such cross-document messaging should expose only the minimum information necessary about user data to code executing in the annotated page. For example: in order to draw highlights, the annotated page needs to know the location of annotations, but it does not ever need to know the body text of an an annotation, and so it should not be possible to expose this over the messaging interface.

Todo

2017-03-08

Currently the client shares an origin with the annotation service when delivered by any mechanism other than the Chrome extension. This makes any XSS vulnerability in the client a problem for the service and vice versa. We need to move the client to its own origin to better isolate the client from the service and minimise the risk posed by XSS.

Input Sanitization

As alluded to above, the client frame is a trusted execution context. Any code running there has full access to everything the user has access to, which may constitute a major security flaw if that code was provided by another user (say, as a <script> tag in the body of an annotation).

This is an example of a cross-site scripting attack (XSS) and must be mediated by ensuring that any and all user content displayed in the client frame is appropriately escaped and/or sanitised.

Transport Layer Security

We ensure that it is hard to eavesdrop on traffic between the client and the annotation service by communicating with the annotation service over encrypted channels (https:// and wss://).

Todo

2017-03-08

This is not currently enforced by the client. Perhaps production builds of the client should refuse to communicate with annotation services over insecure channels?

Clickjacking Protections

The most straightforward way to protect an application from most kinds of clickjacking is the frame-ancestors Content-Security-Policy directive or the older X-Frame-Options HTTP Header.

Unfortunately, the client runs in a framed context (and on arbitrary origins) by default, so simply applying X-Frame-Options: DENY would break the client entirely.

Todo

2017-03-08

The Hypothesis client would appear to have very little protection against clickjacking attacks that allow arbitrary websites to trick Hypothesis users into performing actions they did not intend to perform. It’s not immediately clear what tools we have at our disposal to solve this problem.

Phishing/Imitation

At the moment there is little that would stop a website embedding a replica of the Hypothesis client in a frame and using it to harvest Hypothesis users’ usernames and passwords.

Todo

2017-03-08

Direct credential input must move to a first-party interaction (i.e. a popup window) where the user has the benefit of the browser toolbar to help them identify phishing attacks.

Footnotes

1

An origin is the tuple of (scheme, host, port) for a given web document.