trombonehero / footlights Goto Github PK

Users need to be able to start Footlights without a whole lot of messing about: visit a web page, authorise a JNLP and then don't think about it any more.

This means that we need persistence (e.g. "run on login") and some kind of detection that "we are already running, don't try to start up again".

Currently, it's possible to start saving a plugin's preferences and shut down before finishing the job (e.g. flushing to disk).

We should never be in this dangerous state.

Plugins need to be able to express something like "please create a DOM text node with the value ${user.name}".

We really need a channel that the JVM side of things can use to send asynchronous events to the UI.

This shouldn't be very hard to implement.

Plugins ought to have some persistent state that they can use to bootstrap themselves.

This will probably take the form of a Map<String,String>, since other data can be stored in encrypted FIle objects, and plugins ought to be able to open explicitly crypto-named files.

Within a sandbox, context.name = 'HACKED' succeeds. Since the context's name is used to drive Ajax, malicious JavaScript could send requests to other sandboxes' servers, or even the root context.

Currently, a sandbox can create event handlers like:

proxiedImage.onmouseover = function()
{
    this.parentNode.[...];
};

and this will refer to the naked DOM image rather than the proxied image.

We really need a channel that the JVM side of things can use to send asynchronous events to the UI.

This shouldn't be very hard to implement.

How will multiple Footlights users co-exist on a machine?

The most natural way (which aligns best with existing security mechanisms such as DAC) is for each user to run her own Footlights instance. If we do this, however, we need a way for each user to connect to her local instance: should the port number be a hash of the username, for example?

This also requires a login mechanism (which could involve cookies in the browser) to prevent casual use by others on the same machine.