Simple requests could still work without preflight. What I suggest is, complex requests (e.g. fetch()) that don't require cookies (e. g. using credentials: "omit" [1]) shouldn't preflight either.
By the way, the default fetch `credentials` value ("same-origin") doesn't send cookies to third-party websites either. Why CORS still applies here is a mystery to me.
And to clarify, my point here is: I think CORS is a security theater. The only part that really helps is Access-Control-Allow-Credentials (and that's only because third-party cookies are still a thing).
>By the way, the default fetch `credentials` value ("same-origin") doesn't send cookies to third-party websites either. Why CORS still applies here is a mystery to me.
There are other types of authentication besides cookies. E.g. TLS client certs. Does the browser not send a TLS client cert for fetch requests that don't send credentials? In some cases that could double the number of TLS sockets: one socket with a client cert and one socket without a client cert.
Another type of authentication is sites that only allow requests from certain source IP ranges. Or similarly, services run on a local LAN that aren't exposed to the public internet (e.g. a router's admin panel that's only accessible to devices on the LAN) or a service running locally on your machine serving on localhost. Someone might want to run a service locally and allow foo.com to make requests to it and read their responses, but block evil.com from making requests to it and reading the responses. And there might be no cookies involved with that local service, because it's running locally on the user's machine and thus doesn't need cookies to know who the user is. Of course we also need to consider DNS rebinding attacks. Those can be protected by Host header checks or Origin header checks, but Origin header checks only work for requests that send an Origin header, which aren't all requests.
>I think CORS is a security theater.
The same origin policy and CORS have 2 aspects:
1. Preventing evil.com from reading the content of email.com . I don't think this is security theater. This is very useful for security and doesn't have a bunch of confusing caveats. CORS headers can be used to allow good.com to read the content of email.com if email.com wants to allow that. That's useful for certain functionality.
2. Preventing evil.com from sending certain types of requests to email.com . This has a bunch of confusing caveats about which type of requests are allowed and which types are blocked. So this isn't super useful. However I don't think I'd call it security theater. Here's how I think this restriction was created: As browsers added more and more ways to send requests, they wanted to avoid introducing vulnerabilities to websites that were created in the past before those types of requests could be sent and that relied for security on the assumption that those types of requests couldn't be sent. So the browsers implemented preflights to make sure that these new types of requests they were creating wouldn't introduce vulnerabilities to old websites.
> Does the browser not send a TLS client cert for fetch requests that don't send credentials?
I think it doesn't. From MDN: “Credentials are cookies, TLS client certificates, or authentication headers containing a username and password.”
> Another type of authentication is sites that only allow requests from certain source IP ranges.
This one can be tricky, yeah. Ideally such devices would check Origin header, but that ship has sailed I guess.
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But I think it should be pretty safe to allow cross-origin requests that:
- don't use credentials and
- don't go to a private network.
This means that evil.com can GET https://email.com/ without CORS, but the response won't be personalized to user (so they can read the landing page but not your messages). They can also POST https://email.com/api/send, but that wouldn't do anything as again we don't include credentials.
good.com will send a request with credentials and in this case CORS should be checked indeed.
If evil.com tries to POST https://192.168.0.1/reboot we require CORS too since it's in a private net. If evil.com tries to GET https://192.168.0.1/config we don't send preflight but check CORS headers on the response before allowing to read it.
If your site is on public net and you authorize users solely by IP – that's on you.
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fetch_API/U...
By the way, the default fetch `credentials` value ("same-origin") doesn't send cookies to third-party websites either. Why CORS still applies here is a mystery to me.
Edit: some requests can work without preflight, but there are some absurd limitations (GET/POST only, and request body can't be a JSON): https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CORS#simpl...
And to clarify, my point here is: I think CORS is a security theater. The only part that really helps is Access-Control-Allow-Credentials (and that's only because third-party cookies are still a thing).