this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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@bloodfart @kilgore_trout
"when someone goes to a website, their guard is up. When they click on an app their guard is down."
???
I mean, you can come up with attacks that exploit a users behavior when they think they’re being careful but just consider the propensity to allow camera or location access in browser versus in app: when it’s in browser the phone request says “this website wants to use your location” and gives you the option. When it’s in app the phone (at least used to, I don’t think I have any pwas anymore) says “app_name wants to use your location”.
Everyone trusts the app more. We all see that some website wants to track us and think “yeah right, and then bundle that and sell it!” But for better or worse we trust the applications more. It’s not reflective of actual secure procedures but it’s how people act.
You made another comment about how specifically the webkit jail is very secure. It’s pretty good. That security is exactly why apples trying to tighten up the leash on pwas. One of the only reasons they’ve been able to keep em in and still say “oh we’re so secure” is because they know what the os will allow and what the browser will allow and what’s allowed to be on the os.
This is all happening right after the eu said they gotta allow other browser engines so that’s one of the three legs of that security structure. I think a lot of what we’re seeing is in preparation for pwas to try and start bundling browser engines or targeting the behavior of non webkit engines (not even in like a security targeting way, like build targeting). Once that happens it doesn’t matter how perfectly the security structures of ios and webkit link up, the leaks between ios and gecko or chromium are the new top priority.
Another concerning aspect about having pwas on other engines is how deeply security practices are integrated into ios. It’s got a bunch of little screens and settings and doohickies and gewgaws meant to make otherwise hard to comprehend security ideas not just easy to understand but easy to address.
How can those user facing controls and whatnot be kept up to date in the face of more browser engines far outside the control of the developers making them?
We do everything over the web nowadays and I’m not so sure the second biggest target needs to get exposed more.
@bloodfart
I've read through your comments and it seems like your primary concerns are:
you believe users "trust" apps and "distrust" websites, and PWAs trick a user into a false sense of trust, and the user's personal feelings are somehow relevant to the security of the software
you believe that it is possible to bundle a browser engine, customized by the PWA developer, that will be installed with the PWA and the PWA will run inside of
I'm going to need a source on 2
If you don’t think users are part of the security equation I don’t know what to tell you.
I’ll try to dig up a source for the second thing tomorrow morning when I’m in front of a computer. Four years or so when I dipped my toes into what was then a new technology to see what it’s all about that was the example in the site I looked at to learn how it worked and how to translate an interactive website into an offline pwa.
As you can imagine I found that repulsive and dropped it like a bad habit. Seeing a multitude of pwas on every android device all doing out of band alerts and notifications just made me more opposed to them in general.
Looking into the state of pwas today it really seems like the best support is through chromium/blink. Do you think once apple gets ahold of allowing other rendering engines they’ll allow them back on or what?
@bloodfart
I could be wrong, but I think you are simply mistaken because there should be absolutely no possible way for the PWA to install a browser engine onto your device? The user can first install the browsers of their choice, separately, and then install PWAs using that browser.
That would be a huge concern and really contradict the entire point and purpose behind PWAs as I understand them... I've been searching but can't find anything like what you say. I'd love to see your source
I dug up my old development backups from that time and I had it backwards, the advice was to read user agent strings and link directly to the version of the browser your pwa was designed for if you saw they weren’t running the “right” one and were worried about it breaking.
So I was mistaken but the reality was weirdly still bad.
I don’t know if that’s still commonplace. Right now it seems like a lot of pwas target chrome because it’s the most popular browser.