I'm a fan of fast native code, but I worry that this promotes sneaky code in the background once it gets widely adopted.
With javascript we basically have open-source web apps. I often skim through js source to learn new tricks - and obfuscation doesn't really stop me (apart from google's java-translated js) . With compiled NaCl I probably wouldn't be able to find out a lot.
I'm not talking about "stealing user data" when I say sneaky code. No, with compiled native code a whole new game is started: computational-intensive code. It wouldn't be that difficult to include code that gets a job to work on for a few minutes: breaking captchas, brute-forcing passwords, anything that shift computational effort from a server to a client.
It doesn't run by default. But remember it's Google who's pushing this, and their browser has momentum. I'd guess it's just a matter of time before they run it by default. They already cashed out for security bounties for NaCl in the past[1] and seem to have increased resources recently[2] since it's quite a lucrative market for gaming.
Comments
I'm a fan of fast native code, but I worry that this promotes sneaky code in the background once it gets widely adopted.
With javascript we basically have open-source web apps. I often skim through js source to learn new tricks - and obfuscation doesn't really stop me (apart from google's java-translated js) . With compiled NaCl I probably wouldn't be able to find out a lot.
I'm not talking about "stealing user data" when I say sneaky code. No, with compiled native code a whole new game is started: computational-intensive code. It wouldn't be that difficult to include code that gets a job to work on for a few minutes: breaking captchas, brute-forcing passwords, anything that shift computational effort from a server to a client.
I would assume the NaCl apps won't run by default. Maybe you get that "click to activate" thing that firefox is implementing for Flash and Java
It doesn't run by default. But remember it's Google who's pushing this, and their browser has momentum. I'd guess it's just a matter of time before they run it by default. They already cashed out for security bounties for NaCl in the past[1] and seem to have increased resources recently[2] since it's quite a lucrative market for gaming.
[1] https://developers.google.com/native-client/community/securi... [2] m.yahoo.com/w/legobpengine/news/google-bringing-high-end-gaming-chrome-via-native-054102268.html
Yeah, that's not what happens, at least not today.