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Avi Bar-Zeev says that the solution to WebGL security will be to ask the user to explicitly enable it per site (so it runs only on trusted sites), to sign shaders in the same way drivers and plugins are signed now, and maybe to maintain a whitelist of sites allowed to use shaders (or any WebGL at all). OK, that will work, but I don't feel that there is much chance of that happening. I still remember when JavaScript was a new-fangled untested technology, and IT departments would disable it by default on untrusted sites. Some people still surf only with scripts disabled. But really, there was immense pressure to give web apps a lot of the features of native apps, and everyone pressed ahead despite the security concerns, which ended up being very serious and costly. I suspect that the same thing will happen with WebGL - it will end up being on by default. The Khronos white paper on WebGL security is a very short and superficial dismissal of extremely complex issues, and Avi Bar-Zeev is being unrealistic about browser vendors being able to work around it all.


I don't believe that is what he is saying. He's saying that he thinks that extreme would still be worth it if that was required to run WebGL.




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