W3C

– DRAFT –
Web security docs for MDN

12 March 2024

Attendees

Present
Simone_Onofri Will_Bamberg Rick_Byers Enrico Morisi Dipika Florian_Scholz
Regrets
-
Chair
wbamberg
Scribe
fscholz

Meeting minutes

Will presents. Slides https://wbamberg.github.io/web-security-w3c-breakouts-march-2024/

Will: We're committed to write docs about Web Security, we would love your feedback, especially from security experts

Will: We need better security docs on MDN

Will: We have good reference docs on CSP, CORS, etc

Will: The current content is disorganized not usuable in structured way

Will: There is a lot of missing content for a web developer to know what is a secure web site

Will: We've come up with 4 different categories of docs: Theory, Practices, Attacks and Tools

Will: Theory is concepts like Same-origin policy

Will: The main thing I want to talk about is Practices

Will: Things a developer might need to take care of

Will: We want to provide concrete practical guidance, like auth, user input, 3rd party

Will: Authentication: We have collected ideas on what to talk about, but maybe we can get to that later

Will: Security 101 guide: a baseline to establish

Will: Need feedback on the overall shape of these docs

Will: We want feedback on how talk about usage of frameworks, we usually talk a lot about web standards and not frameworks, but frameworks are important here

Will: The fear of imperfections: How can we help people who want to be better without the fear of saying things that aren't 100% secure

Dipika: I like the overall plan.

Dipika: Have you already identified security experts to review the docs?

WIll: We haven't identified specific experts yet, but we are on it

Will: it is critically important to have expert review

Dipika: Collaborating with experts from the industry will help with the fear of imperfection

Simone: We're creating a CG within W3C to help with this

Simone: Can understand the fear of imperfection. Developers want simple solutions, like running a tool or pasting in code

Simone: I wrote guidance for web developers but it was a lot to read and people don't read

Will: Even if your code is audited later, it sill makes sense to educate developers up front to avoid loads of things to show up in the audit

Will: I would love to read your guidance, Simone

Dipika: I like the approach to categorize the docs

Will: What do people think about frameworks?

Simone: Is the framework secure, and is it penetration tested? Like CSRF tokens properly configured etc

Will: Need to take a critical look at how you use frameworks

Simone: Why aren't we including server side vulnerabilities into the outline?

Will: MDN ist mostly the client side, the standardized web platform

Will: Maybe we should talk more about the server side

Will: It is not my intention to exclude the server side

Will: things like input validation

Will: its harder to talk about the server side, but its not helpful to only talk about the client side

Simone: Proposal: Put security principles into the theory section?

Will: I have Secure design principles in my theory category. Maybe threat models should be in the list

Will: Something we haven't talke about is regulations, some governments will probably regulate this space. We can influence this quite likely with our work

Simone: In Italy they created guidelines (not mandatory) based on OWASP

Simone: more or less OWASP top 10

Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 221 (Fri Jul 21 14:01:30 2023 UTC).

Diagnostics

Succeeded: s/principls/principles/

Maybe present: Dipika, Simone, Will

All speakers: Dipika, Simone, Will

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