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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."
"Our policy removes the burden of security from plug-in writers, and gives plug-ins the flexibility to use innovative network architectures to deliver content while still maintaining the confidentiality and integrity of our browser, even if attackers compromise the plug-in," he said.
Great! :)
But even if it works as planned...this new browser is going to enter the market and who is going to download it? A tiny percentage of internet users--those would be part of the same minority who would also know how to use Firefox (and other browsers) quite safely *right now*.
So who is this product for? Seems interesting from a design point of view, but unelss one of the big browsers adopts it, could it really make even a tiny dent on the security of the internet?
I predict no. The internet's main problem is between the monitor and keyboard ;-)
*iza
Careful What You Wish For....
They're using a rendering engine written in a language that gets its stack smashed by buffer overflows. Nearly all browser security bugs that aren't of the XSS-type are due to buffer overflows.
Next.
Seriously, yes, I'd love to see a secure browser I could recommend for my family's computers, but it's alot of hard ground-up work. (It might actually be faster to write a tool to port the current Gecko/Webkit tree to another language automatically than to start in on a whole new rendering engine in a secure language).
Get started now and the silicon will be fast enough by time the browser is ready.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I'll give you an alternative.
Run the browser in a Virtual Machine along with its plugins. When you close it flush all changes to the binaries and keep the changes to the history and cache.
You might not even need VMware to do this, just virtualize the files available to the browser and the memory available to the process. I dont think this will have a performance hit.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Just because it runs as seperate 'modules' which communicate using set message passing functions, that can't directly mess with each others memory or the rest of the system, making it a zillion times more stable and secure than Other Browsers(tm), does not mean that it's going to be loads slower, or more complicated to develop for, or harder to find developers that will commit to developing for it. Monolithic browsers are a thing of the past. It's all about the micro-browser now. Just you watch. The Hirp of Internet Replacing Plugins (HIRP) browser will be what drives all of our web needs in the next 2-5 years/decades. You'll see.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
> This approach allows for complex browsers to actually become safer, by simplifying them. The browser is broken up into a set of components. Each component runs in a separate process, completely isolated (by the operating system) from the other components. In addition, each component is isolated from the rest of the system using mandatory access controls (SELinux in this case) which prevent the component from doing anything that it doesn't need to do.
[...]
> This approach is known to work - it's similar to the approach used by operating system kernels.
Unfortunately, this approach is also known to have several big problems. Take a quick spin through google for the "confused deputy" problem and you will see one of the primary complaints of ACL-based security. Capability-security researchers think they have a solution and in fact created a capability-secure browser called CapDesk several years ago. If anyone is actually interested in the problem they should check it out.