Is There Room For a Secure Web Browser?

An anonymous reader points out an eWeek story about researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who are designing a new web browser based on security. The new software, code-named OP for Opus Palladianum, will separate various components of the browser into subsystems which are monitored and managed by the browser kernel. Quoting: "'We believe Web browsers are the most important network-facing application, but the current browsers are fundamentally flawed from security perspective,' King said in an interview with eWEEK. 'If you look at how the Web was originally designed, it was an application with static Web pages as data. Now, it has become a platform for hosting all kinds of important data and businesses, but unfortunately, [existing] browsers haven't evolved to deal with this change and that's why we have a big malware problem.' The idea behind the OP security browser is to partition the browser into smaller subsystems and make all communication between subsystems simple and explicit."

Comments

Re:Somewhat pointless?

[Bacon Bits]

Don't be so close-minded. The same could have been said for Gecko (Mozilla) or Webkit (Safari) or Opera back in the IE 5/6 heydays.

The less functionality the better

[sweet_petunias_full_]

The solution for a more secure browser isn't to guild it with ever-growing layers of security and virtual machines, quite the reverse, it's to keep things simple.

If we allow an internet to exist without the need for complex interpreted languages, if people open mostly static HTML documents when they open web pages instead of opening a pandora's box of plugins, languages, interpreted bytecodes, activeX gotchas and other unnecessary exploitable garbage, then the entire internet will be more secure.

By making it more complex, exploits and backdoors are virtually guaranteed. But well, that's just *my* ignorant opinion.