Security/Reviews/Firefox5/ReviewNotes/GIO

Date of Review: 2011.05.02

Item Reviewed

• GIO/GVFS integration for opening sftp:// or smb:// URIs directly in Firefox under Gnome bug 494163

Background:

• Only for GNOME, gnome vfs (gvfs) extenion instead that is compiled by default
• Gnome depricating apis etc, this is the replacement
  • Support for sftp is probably good, more leary of smb
    • This is marked as dangerous to load & thus mitigates attack
  • Could be used to read across domains to gain information about the network of a user via the browser (see above mitigation)
  • No worse than an extension that adds a privelaged protocol type
• One diff is GIO is stateful where GVFS is not

Issues Raised:

• How are passwords handled?
  • Uses the Firefox password manager
• Password could potentially be saved and replayed
  • No different risk from any other connection
• This is an extension of the attack surface to the internet for affected platforms, may require changes to SELinux versions for permissions
  • Out of our scope

Action Items:

• None