Slashdot Mirror
Google to be Our Web-Based Anti-Virus Protector ?
cyberianpan writes "For some time now, searches have displayed 'this site may harm your computer' when Google has tagged a site as containing malware. Now the search engine giant is is further publicizing the level of infection in a paper titled: The Ghost In The Browser. For good reason, too: the company found that nearly 1 in ten sites (or about 450,000) are loaded with malicious software. Google is now promising to identify all web pages on the internet that could be malicious - with its powerful crawling abilities & data centers, the company is in an excellent position to do this. 'As well as characterizing the scale of the problem on the net, the Google study analyzed the main methods by which criminals inject malicious code on to innocent web pages. It found that the code was often contained in those parts of the website not designed or controlled by the website owner, such as banner adverts and widgets. Widgets are small programs that may, for example, display a calendar on a webpage or a web traffic counter. These are often downloaded form third party sites. The rise of web 2.0 and user-generated content gave criminals other channels, or vectors, of attack, it found.'"
Here's the actual paper. It's a Usenix paper.
What they're doing is straightforward, and it's much like what many virus scanners do. First, they look at web pages to see if there's anything suspicious that requires further analysis. If there is, they load the page into Internet Explorer (of course) in a virtual machine, and see if it changes its environment. The better virus scanners have been doing something like that for a few years now, running possible viruses in some kind of sandbox. Although they usually don't go all the way and run Internet Explorer in a virtual machine. (Are you allowed to do that under Microsoft's current EULA for IE 7?)
The main problem with Google's approach here is that it's after the fact. They won't notice a bad page until the next time they crawl it. Bad pages come and go so fast today that they'll always be behind. As the paper says, "Since many of the malicious URLs are too short-lived to provide statistically meaningful data, we analyzed only the URLs whose presence on the Internet lasted longer than one week."
If Google implements this, the main effect will be to push attackers into changing site names for attack sites even faster.
It's all so backward. What we need is to run most of Internet Explorer in a tightly sandboxed environment on the user's machine, so that when you close the window, any browser damage goes away. That would actually work.