Microsoft, Apple Dis WebGL

Microsoft says its insecure; Apple wont be supporting it in iOS 5, except to accelerate its iAds.

Googles campaign to make web apps perform as well as desktop apps hit a roadblock this week when Microsoft and Apple separately dismissed an emerging specification to render 3D web graphics using hardware acceleration.
Google has been
promoting WebGL
, a royalty-free, cross-platform API that provides support for hardware graphics acceleration on the web, since the release of Chrome 9 in February. WebGL, the company says, is a way to experience high-quality 3D in the browser.
Google needs hardware acceleration to make Chrome competitive with Microsoft Internet Explorer 9, which includes hardware acceleration
through its Windows DirectX graphics API
.
WebGL is an open alternative to Microsofts proprietary technology, but Microsoft argues that WebGL is open in the wrong sense: open to attack. Citing two reports critical of WebGL from Context Information Security, Microsoft on its Security Research & Defense blog
said
that Microsoft products supporting WebGL would have difficulty passing the companys Security Development Lifecycle requirements.
We believe that WebGL will likely become an ongoing source of hard-to-fix vulnerabilities, said the MSRC Engineering team on Thursday. In its current form, WebGL is not a technology Microsoft can endorse from a security perspective.
The Khronos Group, which
published the WebGL 1.0 specification
in March, defended its technology. In an email, a Khronos Group spokesperson said that all the browser vendors are working toward passing the WebGL conformance suite and that theyre all still developing support for an extension that will solve the reported denial-of-service issues.
A bug in Firefoxs WebGL implementation that allowed the theft of arbitrary windows on the desktop was addressed May 26 and will be resolved in the version of Firefox 5 slated for release June 21, the spokesperson said.
In May, the organization responded to one of Contexts reports by noting that WebGL was architected with security in mind from the ground up.
At the same time, the group appear to concede that at least one of
Contexts concerns
--Cross Origin Resource Sharing--has the potential to be abused. The group
said
in May that it may require making Cross Origin Resource Sharing opt-in or may implement some mechanism to limit abuse.
A Google spokesperson deferred to the Khronos Group, as the actual maintainer of the standard, for comment, but acknowledged that Google runs parts of the WebGL in separate, sandboxed processes for improved security and work[s] with hardware, OS, and driver vendors to proactively disable unsafe system configurations and help them improve the robustness of their stack.
A Google engineer on a WebGL mailing list noted that recent specification changes have been made to address security concerns. In a mailing list post, Google software engineer Kenneth Russell on Thursday said that Chrome is now blocking cross-origin textures in Chrome 13.
As of Chrome 13, cross-origin textures are no longer supported in WebGL per recent spec updates, Russell
wrote
, noting that attempts to upload a cross-origin image, video or 2D canvas element to WebGL will generate a security error.
Apples dismissal of WebGL was less emphatic than Microsofts, but more surprising, given that Apple is officially a supporter of WebGL. On the same WebGL mailing list, Apple software engineer Chris Marrin on Tuesday
wrote
, WebGL will not be publicly available in iOS 5. It will only be available to iAd developers.
Apples disinterest in WebGL for iOS 5 may reflect a desire to move slowly with WebGL until the security issues are ironed out. Even so, conspiracy theorists could frame Apples caution as a way to sustain the native iOS app market at a time when
theres talk
about web apps finally mounting a serious challenge to native apps.
In a few months, if not sooner, the major WebGL vulnerabilities will probably be addressed. But thats a few months more in which Microsoft IE 9 can enjoy bragging rights and a few months more that web apps have to live as second class citizens.
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