Gev Manekshaw

PNA: A Short Life, a Long Shadow

Private Network Access (PNA) — a security feature made its way into browsers to prevent “drive-by intranet access” — stopping web apps from silently reaching into private networks. After a long and bumpy rollout, PNA was deprecated, marking the end of one of the web’s more ambitious security experiments. This talk explores how PNA worked, look at server adoption trends (both in scale and secure implementation), what challenges led to its fall, and what traces of it remain in current browser behavior. We’ll also look at the mechanism stepping in to fill its role, one that moves responsibility to a user’s choice, redefining how browsers draw the line between the web and private networks.