Re: [rtcweb] On the topic of MTI video codecs

[Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 2:40 PM, Daniel-Constantin Mierla <[e-mail]
> wrote:

>
> On 10/31/13 10:27 PM, Eric Rescorla wrote:
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 2:08 PM, Daniel-Constantin Mierla <
> [e-mail]> wrote:
>
>>
>> On 10/31/13 4:10 PM, Olle E. Johansson wrote:
>>
>>> On 31 Oct 2013, at 10:02, Neil Stratford <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>>
>>>  On 30 Oct 2013, at 17:55, Adam Roach <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>  As Jonathan mentioned earlier, this morning Cisco announced that it
>>>>> will be open sourcing an H.264 implementation as well as gratis binary
>>>>> modules compiled from that source and hosted by Cisco for download. Mozilla
>>>>> will be modifying Firefox to support H.264 by downloading Cisco's binary
>>>>> module.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> It seems like most of the groundwork is being done here for a real
>>>> codec plugin API which would obviate the need for any particular codec to
>>>> be selected as MTI.
>>>>
>>>> Can we encourage this new codec plugin API to be developed in an open
>>>> way as part of the standards process and therefore be supported in all
>>>> browsers? (Enabling for example the addition of VP8 to a browser that may
>>>> not natively ship with it.)
>>>>
>>> I don't agree. The idea was to create a realtime web platform without
>>> the need for any plugins or downloadable modules. We've had that for ages
>>> and it is not a good solution.
>>>
>>> I am still for a MTI codec or set of codecs so we always can set up
>>> video calls, regardless of implementation and if it's possible to download
>>> by policy or network conditions a specific binary.
>>>
>>  Downloading a binary opens doors for tons of risks, knowing that lot of
>> carriers do caching or interpose themselves (e.g., it happens very commonly
>> for dns to redirect you to some adds page when typing an invalid domain),
>> thus is easy to replace the original source, so a rather complex security
>> mechanism has to be put in place.
>>
>
>  Solely on the security question...
>
>  I'm not sure what you mean by "rather complex". What I would expect is
> to have signed
> binaries. This addresses the question of attack from the network and is
> how we
> intend to handle things in Firefox.
>
>  Note that any product that auto-updates (like Firefox and Chrome)
> already need
> to have some mechanism for verifying that the things they download are
> correct.
>
>
> Typically the updates you mentioned are done from the project's sites, so
> that is easier to handle. Now there is a third party involved, requiring
> some sync'ing between Cisco and browser's sites. It's like a
> menage-a-trios, pretty dirty affair.
>

I don't anticipate any problems implementing this in Firefox (and in case
I wasn't clear previously, I'm probably the person who will be responsible
for figuring out how to make it work).



>  I wonder why flash plugin was not loaded this way, it was always free --
> but had to be downloaded/installed explicitly by users.
>

Well, that's not true for Chrome, at least, which ships with Flash, though
I agree that that's somewhat different.



 Even the argument that the code can be compiled and signatures compared is
>> not really feasible - simply it cannot be done by mobile devices - they
>> don't have the sdk installed.
>>
>
>  I don't see why this would be needed. The containing program (e.g., the
> browser) doesn't compile, it just does signature verification.
>
>  Obviously, this only addresses the question of attack from the network,
> not malicious binaries constructed by Cisco. I expect that to be addressed
> by third parties doing verified builds and comparing the binaries.
> Presumably,
> one could invent some countersignature mechanism to allow clients to
> verify that a specific third party had verified a build.
>
> If we get to 'one could invent some ...' and wait for that, better wait
> for a pure open source video codec.
>

You might be interested in:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-jose-json-web-signature-17



> Mozilla is working in that direction anyhow.
>

That's going to take rather longer than this.

-Ekr



>
> Daniel
>
> --
> Daniel-Constantin Mierla - http://www.asipto.comhttp://twitter.com/#!/miconda - http://www.linkedin.com/in/miconda
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