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Self-review of security and privacy questionnaire for 2.0 CR transition

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
wasm
Domain
documentation, security

Research direction

Start by reviewing the W3C Security and Privacy Questionnaire, the Fingerprinting Guidance, and RFC 6973 cited in the issue. Verify the paragraph-form answers against WebAssembly 2.0 and record a complete self-review for the CR transition, including whether any new security or privacy impacts exist.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

privacy-tracker security-tracker

Answers to questions to consider from https://www.w3.org/TR/security-privacy-questionnaire/
(organized into paragraph form but with references to each question in parens). https://www.w3.org/TR/fingerprinting-guidance/ and https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6973.html have also been consulted but do not ask specific questions.

WebAssembly provides no access to the surrounding environment other than via the JavaScript API described in the JS API specification. Therefore, WebAssembly cannot collect or expose any information (personal, sensitive or otherwise) to Web sites or other parties beyond what can be collected, exposed or processed with JavaScript (2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.12). WebAssembly memory has the same lifetime as the objects in the surrounding JavaScript environment and is not persisted or serialized (other than by copying it out to JavaScript and using existing serialization APIs) (2.5). No access is provided to the underlying platform or hardware (2.7, 2.8), or to other devices (2.10), or to the user agent’s native UI (2.11).

WebAssembly is an additional program execution mechanism (2.9), and can be executed wherever JavaScript can be executed (2.13, 2.14). Therefore the threat model (3) is essentially the same as for JavaScript code, and has similar considerations for delivery (e.g. WebAssembly code should be protected in transit from active and passive network attackers) and policy (e.g. some loading mechanisms or execution are restricted via mechanisms such as the same-origin policy or Content Security Policy). Origins cannot downgrade security protections (2.16), and non-fully-active documents are handled the same as with JavaScript (2.17).

There are no known security or privacy impacts of any of the new features introduced in version 2.0. There are no new sources of nondeterminism in execution (which would be the most likely source of active fingerprinting information) and (as mentioned above) no new state or access to the underlying platform.

Dominant language
WebAssembly
Stars
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Forks
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Avg merge
10h 38m
Merged PRs (30d)
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Getting set up

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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