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Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien Magisterarbeit - SemanticLab

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• All debugging messages are also not printed into a tab anymore but are rather<br />

written into the error console of Firefox.<br />

• Of course it is possible to enable or disable the debugging-mode and hence all<br />

debugging messages by using the corresponding preference in Firefox.<br />

• As everyday-users should not be bothered by too many options which are not relevant<br />

to them, the debugging mode has to be set directly by accessing the extensions.webprivacy.debugMode-preference<br />

using “about:config”, Firefoxs’ preference<br />

manager.<br />

• P3P policies cannot be fetched directly from the Internet anymore in Firefox 3.<br />

This was replaced by using an XML-HTTP-Request.<br />

• Domains with hyphens, numbers etc. can now be checked and IDNs 6 are also<br />

supported.<br />

Basically, Webprivacy builds on three parts of Privacyfox: Fetching the XML-file from<br />

the well-known location, checking if it is a reference file or a P3P policy and, more<br />

importantly, the parser which translates P3P XML-files into human-readable policies.<br />

All of these parts are relevant regarding P3P compliance, that is why they were also<br />

enhanced:<br />

• As already described, P3P defines four mechanisms to fetch P3P reference files<br />

and Privacyfox only supports the well-known location method. Webprivacy now<br />

also has rudimentary support for the other three options build in. Rudimentary<br />

because websites which use (X)HTML-links or even HTTP-Headers to provide<br />

P3P reference files could rarely be found, so in-depth testing of these features with<br />

“real-life” examples was not possible.<br />

• While testing all four mechanisms with as much websites as possible, the author<br />

found that a significant number of websites do not correctly implement them:<br />

Instead of “w3c/p3p.xml” some other path or filename is used, the P3P HTTP<br />

header is either not named correctly (“P3P”) or is invalid, (X-)HTML-link-tags<br />

are not named correctly and so on. This is a serious issue for P3P clients as they<br />

cannot guess where P3P reference-files can be found. Additionally, they are not<br />

allowed to change not well-formed XML-files if they still want to be P3P compliant.<br />

• According to the P3P standard, policies which include the “TEST”-element have<br />

to be considered not valid which Webprivacy now does.<br />

So although some of the critical issues regarding P3P compliance have been fixed by<br />

Webprivacy, there are still some issues which are not accounted for: Multiple policies<br />

in one file, P3P compliant check of the Expiry-element, checking all externally loaded<br />

files such as ads or flash-images and cookies and, more importantly: check if the website<br />

6 IDN - Internationalized Domain Name<br />

61

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