Microsoft has taken the position that WebGL is too great a security risk and the existing defenses are not robust enough. There is some ongoing debate over whether these defenses will prove adequate in the long term.
See also this third study, which demonstrated the existence of these vulnerabilities on a number of browsers and web cards (at the time).īrowsers have responded to this with a variety of defenses: they have blacklisted video cards with known security problems they have tried to fix the known memory safety problems and they have restricted use of WebGL per the same-origin policy, to prevent a malicious web site from using WebGL to spy on users' use of other web sites. They found some memory safety issues in several WebGL APIs, and also found some attacks that would allow one web site to read pixel data of other web sites (which could enable a breach of confidentiality).
There was one high-visibility white paper (see also the sequel) which looked at the security of the WebGL implementation in browsers at the time, and found a number of vulnerabilities.
However, many of these APIs and their implementations were not originally designed to be provided to untrusted entities (they were only usable by native applications, which are fully trusted), so there are concerns about whether exposing them to arbitrary web sites might enable web sites to attack your system. The browser does attempt to sandbox this code (to a certain extent), and browsers do enforce a number of security restrictions designed to prevent malicious behavior. One major risk is that WebGL involves running code directly on the video card, and exposing APIs that provide direct access to video card APIs.
The browsers have put in place some defenses against the security risks, but there seems to be some debate about whether those defenses will prove adequate in the long run. Yes, WebGL is indeed a potential security risk, though the magnitude of the risk is hard to assess and open to debate.
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