[webkit-dev] Implementing OffscreenCanvas

[Chris Lord]

Hi John,

I don't know what the current state is of counter-measures for such an
attack, but I don't immediately imagine OffscreenCanvas would make them
more effective. The patch series doesn't add any new rendering paths, so
whatever was possible before will likely still be possible and whatever
wasn't will hopefully still not be possible. That said, I'll look into
this and discuss it with some people that will know better than me and
try to get a better picture.

Thanks,

Chris

On 2019-10-10 17:32, John Wilander wrote:
> Hi Chris!
> 
> Canvas is a very popular GPU fingerprinting vector and allowing it
> offscreen sounds like a more convenient way to perform such an attack
> on user privacy. Do you know if Blink or Gecko have elaborated on
> this? What is your assessment?
> 
> Given the cross-engine effort to fight device fingerprinting and
> WebKit and Gecko’s recently published tracking prevention policies, we
> should do a threat analysis of this feature.
> 
>    Regards, John
> 
>> On Oct 10, 2019, at 4:24 AM, Chris Lord <clord at igalia.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I've spent the last month or so 'finishing' the implementation of
>> OffscreenCanvas[1], based on Žan Doberšek's work from a year ago[2].
>> OffscreenCanvas is an API for being able to use canvas drawing without a
>> visible canvas, and from within Workers. It's supported by Blink and has
>> partial support in Gecko.
>>
>> It's at the point now where I'd consider it a finished draft - it is
>> almost fully implemented and passes the majority of relevant tests in a
>> debug build without crashing, but has some areas that need completion on
>> other platforms (async drawing on non-Linux) and some missing parts (Web
>> Inspector, ImageBitmapRenderingContext). It almost certainly needs
>> reworking in places.
>>
>> My work is on GitHub[3] - I'd like to solicit reviews and comment. Some
>> of the bugs hanging off [2] have patches that need review and I think
>> are near ready to being landable as the foundation of this work. It is
>> broadly split up like so:
>>
>> - Refactor to move functionality from HTMLCanvasElement to CanvasBase
>> - Refactor to not unnecessarily require HTMLCanvasElement in places
>> - Implement OffscreenCanvas functionality
>> - Make font loading/styling usable from a Worker and without a Document
>> - Implement AnimationFrameProvider on DedicatedWorkerGlobalScope
>> - Implement asynchronous drawing updates on placeholder canvases
>>
>> I expect the font-related stuff to be the most contentious, and my
>> AnimationFrameProvider implementation may be too trivial (but might be
>> ok for a first go?)
>>
>> All feedback appreciated. Best regards,
>>
>> Chris
>>
>> [1]
>> https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/canvas.html#the-offscreencanvas-interface
>> [2] https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=183720
>> [3] https://github.com/Cwiiis/webkit/tree/offscreen-canvas
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