169106 - Network "zone" manager

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Networking, defect)

Description

[benc]

Many bugs involve users trying to get some services to work only with some
sections of the internet.

This idea of calling them "zones" comes from IE, and although I think their
documentation is vague, the general idea has some utility, especially as a
user-defined naming convention that can be used across multiple network features.

Offline needs this (bug 90153).

Comment 1

[Alex Bishop]

Any reason why this is Mac OS X only?

Comment 2

[benc]

nope!

Comment 3

[benc]

bug 167806 suggests we need this for making checkloadURI more selective.

Comment 4

[benc]

This would also be useful for any kind of network services we might want to
provide that are intranet or security based.

For example, making checkloadURI work only for external zones. Blocking refer
lines that have intranet URLs.

Comment 5

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

IIRC, there is a very old bug to make all prefs (where it makes sense)
site-specific. This may be a dup of that?

Comment 6

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

is this a dupe of bug 165531  or bug 38966  (since bug 115789 ) was duped to that?

Comment 7

[Philip Chalmers]

FF needs a "security zones" model, similar in concept to IE's although the details and UI may differ.

Key features
------------
(a) Facility to categorise Web pages into a number of groups / zones. IE's definitions look sensible - local (hard drive and LAN), Internet (default for pages from the WWW, also applies to pages provided by a "local" web server such as Apache on own PC), Trusted (allows more facilities than Internet zone), Restricted (allows far fewer facilities than Internet zone).
(b) Facility to set security, privacy and Web features options individually for each Zone.
(c) Built-in default security levels "low" (most things allowed), "medium" (allows most things except known hazards like cross-site scripting, persistent cookies, cross-domain cookies), "high" (possibly allows only mark-up and CSS). For users who don't have the time or knowledge to use detailed settings. FF installers should set Local and Trusted zones to "low", Internet zone to "medium" and Restricted zone to "high" if there are no existing security / privacy settings.
(d) Facility to revert a zone's security level to a previous specification. See comments on FF security alerts below.
(e) If at all possible, this approach should be extended to email cients which use Gecko to display HTML emails.

Why required
------------
(a) Some e-government and legitimate e-commerce sites require browser facilities which users should think twice about allowing for unknown sites. These facilties often include JS and persistent cookies. At present users have to use the Options dialogue to set these facilities while using such sites and then remember to unset them before visiting other sites. Assigning these sites to a  "trusted" category would reduce the risk that users might forget to set more stringent security / privacy options before leaving e-government and legitimate e-commerce sites.
(b) At the other end of the respectability scale, some sites already use AJAX-like techniques to force ads on users without triggering FF's pop-up blocker. Users should be able to consign these sites to the restricted zone.
(c) If there's a security alert relating to FF, users should be able to set the Internet zone's security / privacy levels to "high" until the problem has been fixed. In this case it would be helpful to enable users to revert to a previous, less stringent security / privacy level once the problem has been fixed.
(d) HTML emails are possibly a greater security / privacy threat than Web surfing - the bad guys simply send malicious / hard-selling pages to users' in-trays. Gecko-based email clients should be able to set "Restricted zone" security / privacy levels for incoming mail.

Without such facilties, a lot of FF's perceived security advantages over IE will evaporate if MS makes IE's security settings distinguish between scripting for DHTML (the worst this can do is push ads) and scripting for HTAs (which have been used to install malware). If MS separates DHTML and HTAs while FF does not provide something like zones, MS can claim that IE offers security / privacy facilities which are easier to manage and therefore safer for the user.

Comment 8

[Zarco Zwier]

Some time ago, I proposed to add something similar to Thunderbird, see  Bug 260020.
I've added an attachment as an example how it should look like...
I think your request is related to mine, except for the product that differs.
To bad, I don't have the time nor the skills....