LOlogicalshift·Jun 21, 2018
I've been building an animation tool that provides a UI over http (https://github.com/logicalshift/flowbetween) so it has a lot of these problems.
For running as a local app, what I really want is to be able to run the server as a UNIX-domain socket. (Well, I can do that fairly easily but what I really want is for browsers to be able to connect to one of these).
For a single-user app the main issue is that it could be running on a multi-user system so there's the possibility of contention for ports and so on, as well as the need to verify that the right person is connecting - while it's possible to just bind the server to the loopback address anybody on the same system can access it there so it's not necessarily secure enough. For localhost verification, accessing/setting some information from a file URL might work.
With the loopback addr
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ess, encryption doesn't seem to matter too much: anybody capable of intercepting traffic between a piece of software and the browser will also be in a position to just directly read what you're typing. Possibly by looking over your shoulder.
However, one of the reasons I want a HTTP UI is to make it possible to use something like an iPad as an input device and there are definitely issues there when the service is something that's randomly stood up and torn down and usually running on a local network rather than the internet: in particular TLS really expects a centralized service so it seems anything other than a self-signed certificate isn't going to work and that comes with a bunch of scary messages for the user.
The other issues of authentication all seem to be much the same as for any other web app, though it seems to me that it's possible to streamline it a bit as it'll be quite common for a user already authenticated on one device only to need to prove that they're the same user on another.