Community for assessing domain thread

[mauriceKA]

Dear NoScript team,

I was wondering if you thought about adding a feature like this:

From an (inexperienced) user's perspective, when using NoScript s/he is presented with domains that s/he can white list. It is not easy to assess the risk evolved in allowing a certain domain. Why not source the crowd's knowledge here: Add a new menu item "discussion on '<domain.name>'" next to "allow" and "temporary allow". This could lead to a crowd-maintained domain database where domains could be described in the same way viruses are described in the lists that virus scanners point to. It could look something like this:

<Domain name>
General Risk: <clickable display of 1-5 stars or skull and crossbones> (of <xx> assessments)
Threads / Annoyances:
<clickable skull display> tracking (of <xx> assessments)
<clickable skull display> illegal content (of <xx> assessments)
<clickable skull display> advertising (of <xx> assessments)
<clickable skull display> analytics (of <xx> assessments)
<clickable skull display> malicious content (of <xx> assessments)

You could let the user give his own impression by clicking the skulls and submitting their vote (secured by a captcha). Additionally, you could let users give free text comments - although this would probably require moderation (also secured by a captcha).

In time you will have a pretty good database and are able to give good advice to people whether it is ok to white list a site or not. The assessments (star rating) could be already included in the NoScript menu. You could even sell the list - domain risk assessment is valuable knowledge.

What do you think about my idea? Would that not be a gigantic increase of usefulness for the user?

Best regards,
Patrik

[luntrus]

Hi mauriceKA,

Just a few side-notes on your idea. You would like to add a sort of reputation scanner to NS. Sort of NoScript with WOT.
This could help in giving a general clue of where not to go. Alas Cybercrime has changed the landscape quite a bit so that trusted and reputable sites are becoming hacked grand style to serve as re-directs to sites with malware all-sorts will infect you if you would be without the NS in-browser protection..... So some exploits in not fully patched website software, PHP, etc. could make a site suspicious or dangerous even just overnight and without a real time WebShield scanner the user would not know in advance if the link was safe to click and/or if it would be advisable to allow script being run on (part of) that website inside the browser. For partly allowing requests I use NoScript next to RequestPolicy. Cannot do without this pair of extensions as they go hand in hand to fully protect my online browser activities.

Just an example as it could say more that a lot of words:
Particular Razer mouse drivers have been infected with a trojan through a site hack (19-09-09): http://www.virustotal.com/analisis/ba4a ... 1253486307
Also for further details see my posting here:
http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic= ... #msg412698
The suspicious code your feature should have flagged in real time is this:

Code: Select all

v*r popUpWin=0;
id=document.loc*tion.href;
function popUpWindow(URLStr, left, top, width, height)
{... }.........[*=a - broken by me - luntrus] 

If you could bring that not even the users of NS would profit from that knowledge, also the webadmins of the hacked mouse driver downloads would understand why a trojan could be injected into their setup executable,

luntrus