Sorry to slightly sidetrack this discussion, but someone recently asked me if it were possible to modify a steward's user JS so that it granted them advanced rights like steward/checkuser/oversight. This of course is possible, but very rare since you need to be a sysop to edit these JS pages. The point this person was making to me however was that on smaller wikis it can be easy to become a sysop, and it's probable that by nature stewards will show up there occasionally, and that their own personal JS may not be closely watched. I told them not to worry about it, but if we really wanted to do something, we could make a steward's JS only be mutable by other stewards (or something).
Maybe something else to think about?
~Leon
On Thu, Mar 15, 2018 at 5:46 PM, Eran Rosenthal eranroz89@gmail.com wrote:
Lego already did a script to verify no external resources are loaded: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T71519 I think there is a Jenkins job running it on regular basis
On Thu, Mar 15, 2018 at 6:30 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
What ways are there to include user-edited JavaScript in a wiki page?
[...]
You can't see it now, but it was someone including a JavaScript cryptocurrency miner in common.js!
Obviously this is not going to be a common thing, and common.js is closely watched. (The above edit was reverted in 7 minutes, and the user banned.)
But what are the ways to get user-edited JavaScript running on a MediaWiki, outside one's own personal usage? And what permissions are needed? I ask with threats like this in mind.
There's an old post of mine that documents some of the ways to inject site-wide JavaScript: <https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2014-
August/073787.html
I believe, as Brian notes in this thread, that most methods require
having
the "editinterface" user right so that you can edit wiki pages in the "MediaWiki" namespace. By default, this user right is assigned to the "sysop" user group, but if you search through https://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/InitialiseSettings.php.txt for the
string
"editinterface", you can see that on specific wikis such as fawiki, this user right has been assigned to additional user groups.
Jon Robson wrote:
It has always made me a little uneasy that there are wiki pages where JavaScript could potentially be injected into my page without my
approval.
To be honest if I had the option I would disable all site and user
scripts
for my account.
You could file a Phabricator task about this. We already specifically exempt certain pages, such as Special:UserLogin and Special:Preferences, from injecting custom JavaScript. We could potentially add a user preference to do what you're suggesting.
That said, you're currently executing thousands upon thousands of lines
of
code on your computer that you've never read or verified. If you're a standard computer user, you visit hundreds of Web sites per year that
each
execute thousands of lines of untrusted scripts that you've never read or verified. Of all the places you're likely to run into trouble, Wikimedia wikis are, in many ways, some of the safest. Given all of this code, your computer, as well as mine, are vulnerable to dozens of very real attacks at any time. And yet we soldier on without too much panic or worry.
Has this sort of thing happened before?
Salon.com recently prompted users with ad blocking software installed to voluntarily mine cryptocurrency: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1259653. This situation on fa.wikipedia.org was obviously involuntary. I don't
know
of any similar incidents. We have had wiki administrators inadvertently inject scripts with privacy issues, such as Google Analytics. These scripts have generally been promptly removed when noticed. On the other hand, pages such as https://status.wikimedia.org/ have been loading
the
same problematic scripts (Google Analytics and JavaScript from ajax.googleapis.com) for years and nobody seems to have cared enough
yet.
Can we be sure there isn't a gadget, interface page that has this sort
of
code lurking inside? Do we have any detection measures in place?
A much surer bet is that at least some gadgets and other site-wide JavaScript have privacy issues and potentially security issues. It would be shocking if, across the hundreds of Wikimedia wikis, none of them did.
I think in the past Timo and maybe Alex Monk have done some surveying of public Wikimedia wikis using a browser or browser emulator to check if there are network requests being made to non-Wikimedia domains. As Lucas noted in this thread already, there are also tasks such as https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T135963 that could be worked on, if there's sufficient interest.
MZMcBride
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