exposing sensitive information in URIs - LC comments on draft-nottingham-http-link-header-07.txt

[Julian Reschke <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

finally a security related comment.

During IETF LC for draft-brown-versioning-link-relations we got a 
comment from Eric Rescorla:

"In general this mechanism seems sound but I'm not sure that the 
security considerations are entirely adequate. This mechanism lets you 
learn information about other versions of a resource even if you 
potentially don't have permission to view them directly. Consider a 
limiting case where each version of the resource had a name that 
contained the change set for that resource. E.g.,

http://example.com/versions/filename/_@line_50_+_FOO;@line_60_+_BAR/;

In this case, seeing other parts of the version tree leaks information 
about those versions. I don't think that this is a problem for the 
draft, but it might be useful to mention that this feature has 
implications for name construction."

I assume this is a concern that applies to the Link header in general.

Best regards, Julian