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Chrome Apes IE8, Adds Clickjacking, XSS Defenses
CWmike writes "Google has announced that it added several new security features to Chrome 4, including two security measures first popularized (some later shot down as having 'zero impact') by rival Microsoft's IE8 last year. The newest 'stable' build of Chrome includes five security additions that target Web developers who want to build more secure sites, said Adam Barth, a software engineer on the Chrome team. The two aped from IE include 'X-Frame-Options'" a security feature that helps sites defend against 'clickjacking' attacks, and cross-site scripting protection.'"In Google Chrome 4, we've added an experimental feature to help mitigate one form of XSS [cross-site scripting], reflective XSS,' Barth said. 'The XSS filter checks whether a script that's about to run on a Web page is also present in the request that fetched that Web page. If the script is present in the request, that's a strong indication that the Web server might have been tricked into reflecting the script.'"
Thanks for adding the security features to Chrome, developers at Google. That is all.
Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
Anyone else getting flashbacks from Planet of the Apes?
Is that the new code name for the next version of Chrome? Ubuntu Panhandling Panda, now featuring Chrome Apes! Download now! Steve Balmer your Monkey Boy days are numbered, so dance while you can, it's the year of the Google Desktop.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
security by obscurity... just imagine how many developers will be baffled by this behavior, spending hours trying to find out what is wrong with their code...
I'm interested into how this ties in with commonly used external scripts, such as the jQuery and Yui frameworks which are commonly fetched from their respective servers, rather than hosted locally on the server of the website, so they're cached etc.
Recently I starting doing a bit of web development after being out of the loop for a while. I was working on a project and it was convenient to have the XHTML / JS running on my development machine while doing a few AJAX calls to my development server. After it failed at first I found I could add Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * to the HTTP header to allow cross-site access.
It made we wonder if you wanted to exploit cross-site vulnerabilities couldn't you setup a proxy in the middle that returned information from the original site but added that to the header? Anyway just got me wondering and maybe someone more knowledgeable could comment on it.
Off topic? The summary is pure troll.
Defenses
I like how Slashdot renders that headline.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Oh my god Chrome is copying IE by supporting for the http header X-Frame-Options that Microsoft wants web developers to start using. Don't they know you're supposed to invent your own browser-specific variation of what your opponent implements?
I also like how they mention Chrome added 5 security features but they only cover the 2 that are already in IE.
It's nice that all of the browsers are adding security features but can we cover one of them without focusing on who did what first?
This post of NoScript's author Giorgio Maone dates back to one year ago and goes into the details of X-Frame-Options. His point seems to be that if you have JavaScript enabled, there are well-known ways to achieve the same result, unless you use IE (they can be circumvented). If you don't have JS enabled, NoScript on Firefox is already giving you the same degree of protection. Anyway (this is me) adding that level of protection by default on all browsers looks a nice thing to have.
If Chrome can't block ads it's not ready for the internet. It doesn't matter what else it does and doesn't do, blocking stupid flashing graphics is the main function of web browsers these days.
I hope the submitter realized that the only reason MS even bothered with any of this is thanks to them getting an ass pounding over the last few years for not giving a shit about security. Your welcome MS drones.
MS have never got the 'ass pounding' their security record has earned. If the security problems they cause cost them just 1% of what they cost their customers they would be bankrupt fairly quickly.
Software is weird, where else would you not be responsible for the faults in the products you sell?
...when Google goes ahead, tracks your every move, and sells it to the same crooks anyway?
(Not trolling here. As far as I heard, Google does track everything. And as far as I know, Google does sell that information to advertisers as its main business. Finally, as far as I know, those advertisers include all those spamming crooks and their friends.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I have Adblock and a ton of other extensions working just fine in Chrome. Just use the testing / developer streams which have plugin support.
Chromium blog post on the new security features, some of which are rather interesting
... and the twitter icon as well, appearing on every story and even on my own journal:
fuck off Slashdot.
Because if you were, you probably wouldn't be able to purchase the software as it'd be seriously more expansive than it is today.
expensive != expansive
Your house is seriously insecure, even if you have a steel door and have window panes are made of bullet-proof glass, you probably live in a stick frame building where a drill and a sawz-all can gain me access to the interior in an hour or two. Yet no one seems to get excited about the insecurity of our houses.
When our houses get robbed, we recognize that the wrongdoing is being done by the criminal. Yet when our computers are hacked, we place the wrongdoing on the provider of the software.
I have never really understood why software is held to such lofty standards, particularly on consumer desktops. It would be one thing if file sharing of your entire filesystem was enabled by default in typical software, but lets be real- hacks these days require really clever methods to exploit systems, and if it wasn't for very intelligent, very dedicated people constantly pounding and poking our software, we wouldn't have to worry at all. Yet an uneducated teenager can break into a house in a few minutes with little more than a stick to break a window, and we seem to all go about our day without any outrage at all.
I just don't understand this.
What's "late" about it? This isn't a fix for a security hole, it's a heuristic that helps cut down on some attacks. There is no strict need to implement it, it's just a "would be nice" feature.
Mod parent up please, very informative!
Breaking into a house requires the criminal to be at the house physically and people understand that. Breaking into a computer can take place from virtually anywhere and that seems much more abstract. Since most people don't understand exactly what happened to allow the criminal access, they place the blame with someone who they assume does understand, the software manufacturer.
If a little kid gets hurt and you try to comfort them, they often get angry at you, at least briefly. Same basic idea.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
In large part because, as you point out, it's impossible to make a house physically secure (although security guards can hypothetically do a good job). Similarly, it's impossible to make a computer physically secure (after all, it's in a house or building and those security guards still aren't perfect). Meanwhile, software, being a virtual good, can actually provide absolute security within the confines of the computer that runs it being physically secure. Hence, there's a higher standard held on software.
No. In both situations, the wrongdoers are the criminals. The issue comes to the point, really, of whether any blame can be put upon the constructor of your house (or its parts) and the constructor of your computer (or its parts). For homes, if someone sold a lock that, as sold, should be reasonably able to stop being hacksawed through was in fact hacksawed through, you'd still have reason to blame the lock maker. Similarly, software that is clearly defective against what it reasonably should block would leave blame upon the software maker. The issue, then, is merely that Microsoft (and most software makers) regularly admit their software is faulty (the need for Windows Update). The only real thing left, then, is to point out that Microsoft has such a poor reputation, no person should reasonably expect their software to be secure; if that's your position, I agree that blame is being badly cast on Microsoft.
Again, software can be actually made secure. Most the "easy" exploits have been fixed because they are actually fixable. There's nothing you can do to prevent a teenager from being able to break into a house (well, not legally, anyways); you can in many states/areas shoot the teenager after they enter. The comparison is rather apple and oranges.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
Can anyone tell me whether it finally installs in 'program files', on Windows XP? I haven't been able to find a way with the previous versions, and this is my only hurdle to installing it on my work PC due to the anti-virus rules.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I stopped using Chrome. It comes from a supplier that sees privacy as a problem, and I don't feel I have enough control over what it does with the information it gains from my surfing - that's also why I don't use Google DNS. I also have no idea how to switch the "referrer" information off (in FF that's quite easy).
So, personally I don't give a damn what Chrome (or any other Google app) does. I prefer FF, even when I switch to OSX later this year (yes, I'm switching control freaks :-))..
Insert
Locking your front door and window is merely a deterrent to your fairly normal, average civilized person. It's illusionary security, a social construct that says "hey, this is private, keep out". Same thing with passwords on accounts and firewalls.
Software is held to lofty standards because people don't understand it and blindly have faith in OS vendors, AV vendors etc to magically keep them safe. So when those software companies fail to protect them from threats they don't even really understand they get angry as only ignorant people who got duped can get ;)
Improving security is great, but they really need to keep working on usability as well! I just installed Chrome for the first time yesterday and have been playing around with it. It seems pretty speedy but the UI is a bit weird.
The lack of a title bar seems kind of weird. I don't know what they were going for with that, but it's the only window on my entire machine and it stands out, and not in a good way. At one point i tried adding a new tab while waiting for visual studio to start a debug session, and the UI hung up for a little bit, and for a few brief seconds Chrome acquired a title bar. I actually thought it looked better that way. A couple minor aesthetic gripes. I may eventually get used to having the tab bar above the toolbar, though currently it seems pretty funky to me.
I haven't done a side-by-side comparison with Firefox yet, but my initial rough estimates seem to be that Chrome uses at least 75% as much memory as Firefox, possibly more, and at least as much virtual memory. I find the fact that Chrome has about 40 process running right now to be rather awkward, but hopefully it at least means that when i start closing large numbers of tabs that the memory will actually be released (unlike Firefox.)
The biggest problem however is the tab bar. Personally i don't like having new tabs open in the middle of the bar, screwing up the ordering, but it was easy to find an extension to fix that behavior. However if you open up a lot of tabs they just get smaller and smaller until you can't see what each of them is anymore. And to my further frustration there's no way to access a list of the tabs. There are a couple extensions that offer some kind of tab index, but nothing that presents a simple list like in Firefox.
After a little searching i found out the reason for these problems in a Chromium blog post. The designers are approaching the UI design from a heavily aesthetic angle. Which is good in theory, but they're also being fanatical about it. If they don't think a feature is aesthetically correct but can't think of a more aesthetically pleasing way to implement it they just won't implement the feature at all, even though they admit that the lack of that feature causes usability problems!
And to wrap it all up, they say "In all of these areas we've resisted adding options to control behavior. Keeping our set of options minimal is a good forcing function for us as user interface designers to come up with the right approach, since we never rely on the crutch of making the user decide what we were unable to."
Well i hate to tell you guys, but it doesn't seem to be working really well as a "forcing function" given that you've crippled an important part of the UI while dithering about what the "best" way to implement it is. The blog post was made a year ago and they apparently still haven't found a solution! And i find it very aggravating that they feel once they've come up with the "right" approach they don't want to provide options to do it any other way. Clearly if the user has a different aesthetic sense than the designer then the user is wrong! I've dealt with designers like this on projects before, and trying to convince them that the users can legitimately have a different opinion is a very frustrating task.
I remember the painful process of Firefox developers trying to get their tab bar into a useful state under similar circumstances. Perhaps their solution isn't 100% aesthetically appealing to the Chrome designers, but it undeniably _works_, and leaving the users hanging while they try to figure out something more "aesthetically" and "spatially" pleasing seems like pure egotism to me.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
By this time next year we will be on Chrome Version 17!
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While I agree the users blame the OS the problem with that is as a PC repairman I'd say a good 9 out of 10 infected PCs I have come across my desk can be traced back to PEBKAC. It doesn't matter how many times you warn them, if you wave a cookie in their face they WILL ignore any and all warnings and go around all your nice defenses.
So I would say it isn't the OS it is the user. Just to see if it would help I put one of my PEBKAC customers on Linux. He was one of those "hot pron" guys that would click on anything that had the word porn in it. Did Linux help? Nope, he completely borked the machine in less than a week, to the point the thing wouldn't even boot. How did he manage? He decided he didn't like the package manager and instead Googled "Cool Linux Programs" and then went and installed a bunch of crap he found on Freshmeat and ended up in dependency hell. As they said in Forrest Gump "Stupid is as stupid does". No matter how much you try to idiot proof a box as long as you are not allowed to lock them into a thin client situation the idiot WILL find a way to fuck things up.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.