Securely Hosting User Data in Modern Web Applications (Google Online Security Blog)
Posted by David Dworken, Information Security Engineer, Google Security Team Many web applications need to display user-controlled content. This can be as simple as serving user-uploaded images (e.g. profile photos), or as complex as rendering user-controlled HTML (e.g. a web development tutorial). This has always been difficult to do securely, so we’ve worked to find easy, but secure solutions that can be applied to most types of web applications. Classical Solutions for Isolating Untrusted Content The classic solution for securely serving user-controlled content is to use what are known as “sandbox domains”. The basic idea is that if your application's main domain is example.com, you could serve all untrusted content on exampleusercontent.com. Since these two domains are cross-site, any malicious content on exampleusercontent.com can’t impact example.com. This approach can be…
