Genius' Web Annotations Undermined Web Security (theverge.com)

New reader BradyDale shares an article on the Verge: Until early May, when The Verge confidentially disclosed the results of my independent security tests, the "web annotator" service provided by the tech startup Genius had been routinely undermining a web browser security mechanism. The web annotator is a tool which essentially republishes web pages in order to let Genius users leave comments on specific passages. In the process of republishing, those annotated pages would be stripped of an optional security feature called the Content Security Policy, which was sometimes provided by the original version of the page. This meant that anyone who viewed a page with annotations enabled was potentially vulnerable to security exploits that would have been blocked by the original site. Though no specific victims have been identified, the potential scope of this bug was broad: it was applied to all Genius users, undermined any site with a Content Security Policy, and re-enabled all blocked JavaScript code. Vijith Assar dives deep into how Genius did this :The primary way Genius annotations are accessed on the web is by adding "genius.it" in front of any URL as a prefix. The genius.it server reads the original content behind the scenes, adds the annotations, and delivers the hybrid content. The Genius version of the page includes a few extra scripts and highlighted passages, but until recently it also eliminated the original page's Content Security Policy. The Content Security Policy is an optional set of instructions encoded in the header of the HTTP connection which tells browsers exactly which sites and servers should be considered safe -- any code which isn't from one of those sites can then be ignored.

Comments

Easy fix: continue to ignore genius.it

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Easy fix: continue to ignore genius.it. Or just put "sh" in front of the "it" to get a better result.

Re:Sorry, can't help myself.

[The-Ixian]

bam! out pedanted!