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Comment by herodoturtle | Hacker News Reader

When you go to enable "Unsafe WebGPU Support" it says the following:

"Convenience flag for WebGPU development. Enables best-effort WebGPU support on unsupported configurations and more! Note that this flag could expose security issues to websites so only use it for your own development."

Can someone who knows about this stuff please guide us in terms of what sort of security risk we would would be exposing ourselves to?

Thanks.

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> Also FYI for people on Linux, you need to enable unsafe WebGPU features for this to work.

Browsers on macOS do not require you to enable this feature. Does it mean it's on by default?!

I think the most nefarious thing they can do with this is use it to further fingerprint your browser.

Oops, meant to reply to the GP.

Linux support for WebGPU is incomplete. Other platforms have received more priority and have it enabled by default. Even on platforms where Chrome does support it, the tech isn't available on other browsers necessarily.

I was gonna respond with the generic large swath of unverified code running on your machine, but I realized your question is more specific and more interesting. If anyone knows, I would love to hear an answer on this as well.

Being new, largely untested code paths in the browser, it's very possible for it to have buffer overflow defects that could be exploited to execute arbitrary code on your system. So, basically, literally anything could happen.

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