Re: [rtcweb] Please require user consent for data channels

Consent is an API issue not a protocol and therefore is owned by W3C, not IETF. Why not take it up there?

> On Jul 11, 2015, at 9:42 AM, Daniel Roesler <diafygi@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Howdy all, this is mostly a re-surfacing of the discussion about IP
> address leaking back in April[1], which unfortunately I did not
> discover until recently.
> 
> One of the items in the new proposal was "WebRTC already requires
> permission to access getUserMedia. Why not use that permission to
> control interface enumeration?" That item didn't really get discussed
> much in the thread, but I think it's one of the most important issues.
> 
> Why? There is now a documented case where a third party on nytimes.com
> is using a fake webRTC datachannel to silently gather user local (and
> potentially "real" ISP) IP addresses.
> 
> https://twitter.com/incloud/status/619624021123010560
> 
> So I'd like to voice my support for adding a consent requirement that
> would prevent this type of silent behavior. A user that is
> purposefully visiting a site that has a legitimate reason for using a
> webRTC data channel will have the necessary context to give consent,
> just like they have to get consent on getUserMedia.
> 
> I'm really unclear on why it's so important to have the silent webRTC
> data channel behavior. P2P data connections should be held to the same
> consent requirements just like P2P video and voice connections. In
> addition to the silent third party local IP tracking, a silent P2P
> data channel opens up users to silently becoming nodes in a web-based
> file sharing network. For example, webtorrent[2] can be silently
> embedded on a website so that all of the users to that website start
> seeding content they don't know they are seeding.
> 
> Possible fix:
> 
> 1. Require user consent before calling the callback on createOffer().
> 2. If the user has already given consent via getUserMedia, the user
> consent requirement is satisfied.
> 3. If there's no previous gUM consent, then ask the user for consent.
> 
> This implementation requires no updates to current webRTC demos, since
> you have to wait for a callback on createOffer anyway. I'm open to
> other ways, such as making createDataChannel asynchronous like gUM,
> but that would require updates to existing apps that use
> createDataChannel.
> 
> Thanks!
> Daniel Roesler
> 
> [1]: https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rtcweb/current/msg14494.htm
> [2]: https://github.com/feross/webtorrent
> 
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