The Tangled Web

Chapter 15. Extrinsic Site Privileges

To wrap up the discussion of all the noteworthy browser security features, we’ll look at a handful of mechanisms that grant special privileges to sites hand-picked by the user or hardcoded by the authors of the browser itself. The approach taken in these cases is in stark contrast to the schemes we have discussed previously, all of which rely on a fairly sensible examination of intrinsic properties of the displayed content. Normally, the implementation would have us look at the source of the document, the context it is displayed in, or the nature of the operation that the document is attempting to perform, but barring the outcome of these checks, the browser would never give preferential treatment to a single ...