They don't even get into the repercussions of loading externally-hosted JavaScript into a secure page.
We avoid this entirely (also hosting medical data), though it's been a bit of extra work to do so.
I'm sure Chartbeat, Mathtag, Mixpanel, Google, etc. are reasonably careful about their security, and of course they would suffer as well if one of the servers/scripts was compromised and the breach was made public.
But in short -- healthcare.org's security relies on the idea that none of these many 3rd parties will ever have a CDN server compromised, for example. Or (in other situations) have the NSA demand access.
It just takes one -- and then an "improved" script could be delivered to only clients visiting a single targeted site, or even specific targeted clients. The normal customer just sees the lock icon and can verify that there's a secure connection to the main host; but there are actually many other connections going on to other hosts, and any of them may provide a script that can access any sensitive data on the page.
Comments
They don't even get into the repercussions of loading externally-hosted JavaScript into a secure page.
We avoid this entirely (also hosting medical data), though it's been a bit of extra work to do so.
I'm sure Chartbeat, Mathtag, Mixpanel, Google, etc. are reasonably careful about their security, and of course they would suffer as well if one of the servers/scripts was compromised and the breach was made public.
But in short -- healthcare.org's security relies on the idea that none of these many 3rd parties will ever have a CDN server compromised, for example. Or (in other situations) have the NSA demand access.
It just takes one -- and then an "improved" script could be delivered to only clients visiting a single targeted site, or even specific targeted clients. The normal customer just sees the lock icon and can verify that there's a secure connection to the main host; but there are actually many other connections going on to other hosts, and any of them may provide a script that can access any sensitive data on the page.