During the October 2024 TC39 plenary meeting, it was raised that providing multiple methods of extracting a source map comment that yield different results can cause a security/privacy problem.
This is because on some platforms it can be used as a way to track whether the user is trying to debug the code, or to grab the user's IP thanks to the devtool trying to fetch the source map fro a remote server. Users on those platforms that want to prevent this from happening can pre-scan their code to know if it contains a source map comment or not. However, having two methods of doing so that yield different results can cause these tools to miss some of the comments.
We still got approval from TC39 for submitting our final draft to Ecma, but it was conditional on us:
working to resolve the problem in the next edition
This issue is to track the solution. I propose that there can be two "success outcomes"
the two algorithms are refined so that they always lead to the same result
the regexp-based algorithm is refined so that it can find a subset of the comments found by the parsing-based algorithm, rather than being two sets that simply intersect.
From the discussion during plenary, we concluded that one of the first steps should be to early-exit from the regexp-based algorithm whenever there is a comment that contains one of `, ", ', */. This would avoid ambiguity in cases like
let a = `
//#sourceMapURL=...
//`
This solution is probably not complete though, and this issue is to keep track of it.
During the October 2024 TC39 plenary meeting, it was raised that providing multiple methods of extracting a source map comment that yield different results can cause a security/privacy problem.
This is because on some platforms it can be used as a way to track whether the user is trying to debug the code, or to grab the user's IP thanks to the devtool trying to fetch the source map fro a remote server. Users on those platforms that want to prevent this from happening can pre-scan their code to know if it contains a source map comment or not. However, having two methods of doing so that yield different results can cause these tools to miss some of the comments.
We still got approval from TC39 for submitting our final draft to Ecma, but it was conditional on us:
This issue is to track the solution. I propose that there can be two "success outcomes"
From the discussion during plenary, we concluded that one of the first steps should be to early-exit from the regexp-based algorithm whenever there is a comment that contains one of
`,",',*/. This would avoid ambiguity in cases likeThis solution is probably not complete though, and this issue is to keep track of it.