Alt-Svc Privacy Concerns

[Phil Lello <[e-mail]>]

On Sat, Apr 9, 2016 at 2:36 PM, Ryan Hamilton <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 8, 2016 at 11:01 AM, Patrick McManus <[e-mail]>
> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Apr 8, 2016 at 2:31 PM, Ryan Hamilton <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>
>>> Howdy,
>>>
>>> It is common for web sites to serve content from a variety of different
>>> origins within the same domain. For example, www.example.com,
>>> accounts.example.com, images.example.com. A single page view may
>>> require loading resources from several such origins. (Tricks like domain
>>> sharing can exacerbate this proliferation of origins.) It would be great if
>>> the service had some way to tell the client, "All of my domains can use
>>> this alternative service". What would folks thinks of an include-subdomains
>>> parameter in the Alt-Svc value? If such a parameter were present in an
>>> Alt-Svc advertisement, a client could use this advertisement to apply to
>>> any sub-domain of the origin that the client does not already have an
>>> alternative for. This would avoid the need to discover the alternatives
>>> individually.
>>>
>>>
>> the server can send, unsolicited, on stream 0 an altsvc frame for each
>> origin it wants to provide alt-svc info for (the connection needs to be
>> authoritative for those origins, of course).
>>
>> yesterday's discussion of adding certificates to an established
>> connection would make that more powerful.
>>
>> I would encourage h1 servers to update to h2 to get this feature :)
>>
>
> Hm. This seems plausible for the simple case where the number of extra
> origins is small. But in some cases, the number of extra origins can be ...
> enormous.
>
> ​In the case of YouTube which I'm quite familiar with, there are literally
> thousands of hostnames and they all have the same Alt-Svc. We can't
> practically push an origin frame for each server.​ And even if we could, I
> suspect that browsers will limit the number of servers for which they are
> tracking Alt-Svc information.
>
> I'm concerned that Alt-Svc, especially used like this, is re-introducing
the sort of privacy issues people have been trying to eliminate with
cookies for years. Appologies if this has already been discussed and I
missed it.

Specifically, although I know that, for example, google.com and youtube.com,
are tightly related, the average user might not. Over a TLS end-to-end
connection, Alt-Svc seems to make it easy to track activities between
domains without user knowledge or consent. Ditto for blog1.wordpress.com
and blog2.wordpress.com.

There's also a danger that while a CDN might legitimately advertise Alt-Svc
for different sites it caches, a rogue CDN might seize the opportunity to
track activity across unrelated entities.

Best wishes,

Phil Lello