1462352 - Allow permanent webrtc permissions on moz-extension protocol scheme urls

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1408033

(WebExtensions :: Untriaged, enhancement)

Description

[Luca Greco [:rpl] [:luca] [:lgreco]]

While I was looking into Bug 1459613 I noticed that on moz-extensions urls we don't currently allow to permanent set the webrtc permissions.

The permanent permission can be actually stored, but webrtcUI.jsm doesn't currently take it into account because the moz-extensions urls are not currently considered "secure" by the MediaManager, which currently only send a webrtc permission request with the "secure" parameter to true for https urls:

- https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/00dd116638001772fe354b081353b73f1cad405d/browser/modules/webrtcUI.jsm#457-462
- https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/00dd116638001772fe354b081353b73f1cad405d/dom/media/MediaManager.cpp#2904-2905
- https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/d4b9e50875ad7e5d20f2fee6a53418315f6dfcc0/dom/webidl/GetUserMediaRequest.webidl#17,24

In the past we have made sure that other webAPI/behaviors that are only available to secure contexts (basically only "https web pages") are also allowed from a moz-extension url (e.g. storageManager is one of this cases, https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/StorageManager), and so it seems reasonable to evaluate if we want to do it for the MediaManager's permission requests as well.

Nevertheless I feel that it is better to keep it separated from the original Bug 1459613 scope, and file it as a separate issue so that we can evaluate if we want it and which is the best (and safer, from a "security concerns" point of view) strategy to achieve it.

Comment 1

[Johann Hofmann [:johannh]]

Isn't the WebExtension principal the same for the background page? I remember we had concerns around WebExtensions being able to use the camera in the background without the page being open, but maybe that's not possible for a different reason. It would be good if that reason wasn't just a bug in WebRTC code but rather an explicit decision. :)

Comment 2

[Kris Maglione [:kmag]]

(In reply to Johann Hofmann [:johannh] from comment #1)
> Isn't the WebExtension principal the same for the background page? I
> remember we had concerns around WebExtensions being able to use the camera
> in the background without the page being open, but maybe that's not possible
> for a different reason. It would be good if that reason wasn't just a bug in
> WebRTC code but rather an explicit decision. :)

Yeah. If we do this, we should make sure it doesn't make it possible for background pages to silently use WebRTC