Ask HN: Thoughts on isolating an “allegedly” offline site?
Hi,
I find myself wanting to quickly parse/decode/unescape sensitive data via randomly found sites but cannot. I wonder if there is an existing solution to making sure a random base64 encoder site will not phone home with my data.
Specific use cases:
- Parse a JWT using jwt.io
- Encode/unescape/parse data from a specific format (base64, protobuf, ...)
- Hashing a password
- Generating Bitcoin wallet using bitaddress.org
The solutions I end up doing:
- Finding a way to do it offline (in a terminal) or using/writing a script I can safely audit.
- Load up a VM, load the site, cut it from network, make use of the site and throw away the VM.
I am debating on creating a Browser extension to solve this problem, but wanted to get ideas from you to see if I am missing something that already exists.
The extension would have an isolate functionality that would:
- Cut off network access for a tab
- Cut off access to other tabs (Not sure how to do this, temporary containers in Firefox?)
- Listen for tab close event and clear all browser data for that site (cookies, storage, workers, history etc...)
What do you think? You could just temporarily turn off the internet. For things like this, you should be using a laptop/desktop instead of a server anyways. Yes, in addition to deleting all browsing data (maybe in a private window) for that site prior to re-enabling internet otherwise the site could store information locally and transmit it once online. It is time consuming to do this and do it right so I actually already created an extension for it in another ShowHN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37469321