#464: Origin isolation

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Opened Jan 14, 2020

Hello TAG!

I'm requesting a TAG review of origin isolation.

Origin isolation allows web developers to opt in to giving up certain cross-origin same-site access capabilities (namely synchronous scripting via document.domain, and postMessage()ing of WebAssembly.Module instances). This allows browsers to potentially segregate the origin into its own process. The developer can also provide hints to the browser as to why they are doing so, in the hopes of guiding the browser's process allocation.

Note that this opt in and the accompanying hints are delivered via origin policy (#127).

Further details:

We'd prefer the TAG provide feedback as (please delete all but the desired option):

🐛 open issues in our GitHub repo for each point of feedback

Discussions

2020-01-13

Minutes

Tess: assign me

Hadley: and me

Rossen: and me

David: some ties to Spectre mitigation

Peter and others discuss milestones for issues

2020-02-10

Minutes

Tess: Haven't managed to spend time on this yet. At high level sounds good to let origins opt out of features in general. Need to look at details. Push this out 2 weeks

2020-02-24

Minutes

Tess: no thoughts off-hand right now.

Rossen: some movement on this one - enaggement on Moz's position on this topic.

David: I think Anne has been involved in this.

[discussion on Moz's position]

Ken: [difficut to explain it to developers]

David: I think developers understand what a process boundary is...

Rossen: ...

Ken: some of these. .. difficult to understand...

Dan: concerns about overcomplicating the platform

David: prompted by Spectre mitigation

Ken: we need to come up with better names... make it easier to understand...

David: at some level the explanation is : if you want feature x you need to enable this flag and then you lose features y and z...

Ken: better documentation needed - e.g. on MDN...

Tess: sympathetic to the concern of making things easier for developers...

Ken: dev tools... to help developers...

Dan: can someone leave this feedback on the issue about simplification? I will see if I can raise that feedback in an informed way

2020-03-23

Minutes

Rossen: ... want to do a deeper review of this. The explainer is really good. Goes into some fairly detailed examples and overall proposal of the feature. We should certainly do our part and provide good feedback here. The work done by the team is solid. I don't know that we're going to have a lot to offer – but i want to take time to digest.

Peter: bump how long?

Rossen: I would give it a couple of weeks.

[moved to April 6

2020-04-06

Minutes

Rossen: this is a [big] proposal. Getting up to speed.

Tess: bump one week?

Dan: schedule a special breakout?

[scheduled between Rossen and Tess and left on this week

2020-06-22

Minutes

Peter: missing Tess and Hadley...

Rossen: summarizing... the issue was looked at by myself and Tess... during one of our breakouts. A the time when we looked at it we did an analysis. It looks like the proposal is good and going the right direction. We had some followup questions - one was what is the actual API going to look like. One idea was to explore an API ideally on the window object document.domain. Turns out that was one of things they wanted to remove instead of adding the API there. I still need to add a comment and close that conversation. During the virtual f2f, David gave it a quick read and found some concept inconsistencies... Anne and Domenic proposed some changes to the explainer and some examples. I think what they are proposing sounds good. I don't think there's a lot left to get us to close on this. We could move this to "proposed closing"? Hopefully Tess will have a chance to give her view.

David: I read the replies - it makes sense.

Dan: I can ping Hadley about it

2020-06-29

Minutes

Rossen: we were more or less ready to sign off but wanted Tess to take a look. At the time we convinced ourselves this was good. Not much has changed.

Tess: I'm happy to trust that.

Rossen: David do you have additional feedback?

David: no. Other than that definitions could be improved a little bit - they are aware.

Rossen: I'll write up a summary and propose-close it for the plenary.

UPDATE: Wrote the following comment and closed the review

<blockquote> We reviewed this proposal one more time during our June 29 breakout. At this point we are happy to see it continue to evolve with the HTML community.

@dbaron issue about clarifying the concepts of cross-origin and same-site seems well handled.

@atanassov (my) issue about exposing the functionality behind an API such as document.domain has been self-answered after re-reading the explainer and your additional comments, thus, I consider it non-issue at this point.

Given all issues have been address to our satisfaction, closing the review.

</blockquote