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Security features of Notification Center

Here Core UI Notification Center offers the following features to support application security:

  • Application identity

  • Limited HTML

Application identity​

When an application launches a notification, Notification Center uses the app’s manifest to determine its identity. Therefore, an application cannot pretend to be something other than itself. This strategy enables a few key security features.

No spoofing​

An application does not provide an application name when it creates a notification; instead, the name is read from the application's manifest. As a result, an application cannot generate a notification pretending to be from a source that it is not, thereby causing data leakage.

No access to other apps' notifications​

An application has two ways to access notifications that have already been created:

  • Ask for notifications that it has created.

  • Ask for a notification by ID.

In the first case, Notification Center returns only notifications created with that app’s identity, and not by other applications. Therefore, a vendor can’t browse the notifications of other applications. In the second case, where an app queries by the ID of the notification, a good strategy is to use UUIDs so that other applications can’t guess the IDs used by your application.

Limited HTML​

Notification Center does not allow arbitrary HTML to be used for notifications: the data format is JSON. Therefore, an application vendor cannot inject HTML that contains script elements and run non-Here Core code in its Notification Center app.

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