On Apr 24, 2013, at 8:56 PM, Roy Mendelssohn - NOAA Federal
<roy.mendelssohn@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I don't know enough to add anything technical to the discussion, but I know
> most of us these days operate in an environment of increased security, and
> anything that generally opens up holes is frowned upon ( we have started
> restricting our http ,ethos to GET, POST and HEAD for example).
>
> I agree that more discussion of the security implications is needed, and
> the fact that someone has implemented it and hasn't seen anything nefarious
> won't past muster on security scans.
To reinforce Roy's comments, from the perspective of a U.S. Govt. data
provider, if the security implications are not crystal-clear, we have to treat
it as a potential increase in risk. We already have an uphill battle in
getting any OPeNDAP server approved at all, security-wise. As a result, for
our purposes, we're not comfortable with server distributions that default to
completely open CORS.
I'm generally sympathetic to the desire to enable this kind of functionality,
but the history of computing is rife with cases where really cool functionality
clashed with the potential security implications. I also recognize that not
all data providers operate within our security constraints, so we will be
interested in watching this unfold, with an emphasis on watching.
BUt note that absence of evidence doesn't mean it's safe, as Roy points out.
The burden of proof for us is on proving from first principles that there is no
increase in vulnerability due to open CORS. That is, given a malicious
(inadvertent or otherwise) site, and malicious JS code using it for a
cross-site scripting, will it be crystal clear that our CORS policy cannot be
remotely associated with such an exploit? In the govt., any kind of guilt by
association is almost as bad as actual guilt.
>
> -roy
>
> On Apr 24, 2013, at 5:40 PM, Dennis Heimbigner <dmh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> Turning this on by default is not a good idea.
>> As I indicated elsewhere, if data leaks, then unidata/opendap/...
>> are responsible and that makes us look really bad.
>>
>> =Dennis Heimbigner
>> Unidata
>>
>> Roberto De Almeida wrote:
>>> That was fast, Tom! How does this work, does it add an option for turning
>>> on CORS on THREDDS?
>>> As I was saying to Dennis, what I'm suggesting here is: Javascript is
>>> becoming a major player as a programming language, and if we want our data
>>> to be widely accessed and consumed by the new generation of applications in
>>> ways that we cannot anticipate, we should add these headers. If security is
>>> important we can explain to users how to configure authentication, how to
>>> setup SSL certificates, and how to turn off CORS (or restrict the hosts
>>> instead of using a wildcard).
>>> I think this should be on by default (like I did in Pydap) because
>>> otherwise no one will turn it on, and all the data currently available via
>>> OPeNDAP will be inaccessible to Javascript, because this is not a policy
>>> that can be changed on the browser. But if we start doing it now, providers
>>> will eventually upgrade their servers, and maybe next year we'll have WebGL
>>> applications that can display data from any DAP server on the browser in
>>> 3D, and analyse it using
>>> asm.js<http://ejohn.org/blog/asmjs-javascript-compile-target/>
>>> .
>>> --Rob
>>> On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 12:52 PM, Tom Kunicki <tkunicki@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>> I've created a maven project to create a CORS enable thredds war:
>>>>
>>>> https://github.com/tkunicki-usgs/thredds-cors
>>>>
>>>> CORS is useful for working around single origin issues in browser apps. A
>>>> CORS enabled server essentially tells the browser that it's ok to let code
>>>> loaded from a different server utilize resources from the CORS enabled
>>>> server.
>>>>
>>>> Tom Kunicki
>>>> Center for Integrated Data Analytics
>>>> U.S. Geological Survey
>>>> 8505 Research Way
>>>> Middleton, WI 53562
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Apr 24, 2013, at 2:11 PM, Dennis Heimbigner <dmh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Perhaps more concretely, the thredds server
>>>> currently supports access controls such as
>>>> passwords and client-side keys. How would
>>>> CORS affect those?
>>>>
>>>> =Dennis Heimbigner
>>>> Unidata
>>>>
>>>> Roberto De Almeida wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hi, guys!
>>>> In 2006 I wrote an implementation of an OPeNDAP client in Javascript called
>>>> jsdap (https://code.google.com/p/jsdap/). At the time Javascript was still
>>>> a toy language and the XML HTTP Request (XHR) was unable of handling binary
>>>> data, but I managed to hack a full client that worked in all major browsers
>>>> (including IE by injecting vbscript!). And while it was written more as a
>>>> proof-of-concept the client is actually used in some data portals like
>>>> http://www.ifremer.fr/oceanotronPortal/. (A Node.js OPeNDAP server was
>>>> also
>>>> added 3 years ago.)
>>>> Fast forward 7 years and we now have a lot of new technologies on the
>>>> table: a new XHR object with support for binary transfers, typed arrays and
>>>> WebGL. I've been playing again with using Javascript as an OPeNDAP client,
>>>> in particular to display real time information from OPeNDAP servers. I have
>>>> set up a small OPeNDAP server on one of my VPS streaming the system load
>>>> information:
>>>> http://vps.dealmeida.net:5000/.dds
>>>> http://vps.dealmeida.net:5000/.das
>>>> This is an infinite dataset (try "curl http://vps.dealmeida.net:5000/.asc
>>>> "),
>>>> and it will keep streaming the data at one record per second until the
>>>> connection is broken. Keep in mind that this is a regular OPeNDAP Sequence,
>>>> and nothing was changed in the specification to make this work.
>>>> Nevertheless, I'm not aware of OPeNDAP clients that can access the stream
>>>> other than the development version of Pydap.
>>>> On another machine I have a widget displaying the information on a real
>>>> time graph: http://dealmeida.net/opendap-streaming/
>>>> You can see how everything was implemented on this Mercurial
>>>> repository<
>>>> http://code.dealmeida.net/opendap-streaming/src/356dde80f6e55603c2ab7e581244015663504fda?at=demo
>>>>> .
>>>> The
>>>> data is displayed by fetching the .dods response and parsing it. We still
>>>> need a few hacks to do this, but only because the data is being streamed
>>>> (Mozilla handles it nice; Chrome cannot stream binary data, so it still
>>>> fetches it as string). Handling regular OPeNDAP datasets should be pretty
>>>> straightforward with the new XHR, and I plan to rewrite jsdap as soon as I
>>>> have some free time.
>>>> *Now to my request:* the only reason that the demo works -- having a page
>>>> in one host displaying data from an OPeNDAP server on another -- is because
>>>> I enabled<
>>>> http://code.dealmeida.net/pydap/commits/4c2d38b5822ba8f5f61e83bcb23230a2ca7e5da1
>>>> CORS <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-origin_resource_sharing> on
>>>> Pydap.
>>>> By default, now all DODS, DAS and DDS responses from Pydap have the
>>>> following additional headers:
>>>> Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
>>>> Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Origin, X-Requested-With, Content-Type
>>>> These headers (the first one, actually) allow the responses to be accessed
>>>> through XHR from any host. As far as I know there is no downside in doing
>>>> this. Even if your server use cookies for authenticating access to certain
>>>> datasets the cookies *will not* be sent unless
>>>> the Access-Control-Allow-Credentials header is set (and set to true), which
>>>> would allow other sites to "steal" your data and download it by
>>>> impersonating a logged user.
>>>> My request is that all OPeNDAP servers enable CORS from any host by default
>>>> today, at least in the DODS, DAS and DDS responses; and if not by default,
>>>> at least as an option. This way, by the time Javascript matures enough so
>>>> that its performance on the browser becomes comparable to desktop
>>>> applications we can start building rich web applications that use all the
>>>> data available through OPeNDAP.
>>>> Some resources
>>>> About CORS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-origin_resource_sharing /
>>>> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTTP/Access_control_CORS
>>>> Security concerns:
>>>> https://code.google.com/p/html5security/wiki/CrossOriginRequestSecurity
>>>> Thank you,
>>>> Rob
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> thredds mailing list
>>>> thredds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>>> For list information or to unsubscribe, visit:
>>>> http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/mailing_lists/
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>>
>>>>
>>
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>
> **********************
> "The contents of this message do not reflect any position of the U.S.
> Government or NOAA."
> **********************
> Roy Mendelssohn
> Supervisory Operations Research Analyst
> NOAA/NMFS
> Environmental Research Division
> Southwest Fisheries Science Center
> 1352 Lighthouse Avenue
> Pacific Grove, CA 93950-2097
>
> e-mail: Roy.Mendelssohn@xxxxxxxx (Note new e-mail address)
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>
> "Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill."
> "From those who have been given much, much will be expected"
> "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice" -MLK Jr.
>
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--
Dr. Christopher Lynnes, NASA/GSFC, ph: 301-614-5185
