Popular Firefox Add-Ons Open Millions To New Attack (slashgear.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Security researchers claim that NoScript and other popular Firefox add-on extensions are exposing millions of end users to a new type of vulnerability which, if exploited, can allow an attacker to execute malicious code and steal sensitive data. The vulnerability resides in the way Firefox extensions interact with each other. From a report on SlashGear, "The problem is that these extensions do not run sandboxed and are able to actually access data or functions from other extensions that are also enabled. This could mean, for example, that a malware masquerading as an add-on can access the functionality of one add-on to get access to system files or the ability of another add-on to redirect users to a certain web page, usually a phishing scam page. In the eyes of Mozilla's automated security checks, the devious add-on is blameless as it does nothing out of the ordinary." Firefox's VP of Product acknowledged the existence of the aforementioned vulnerability. "Because risks such as this one exist, we are evolving both our core product and our extensions platform to build in greater security. The new set of browser extension APIs that make up WebExtensions, which are available in Firefox today, are inherently more secure than traditional add-ons, and are not vulnerable to the particular attack outlined in the presentation at Black Hat Asia. As part of our electrolysis initiative -- our project to introduce multi-process architecture to Firefox later this year -- we will start to sandbox Firefox extensions so that they cannot share code."

Comments

This article is alarmist rubbish.

[Anonymous Coward]

What a pile of crap. Heck, NoScript's author outlined it far more eloquently that I ever could: https://hackademix.net/2016/04/08/crossfud-an-analysis-of-inflated-research-and-sloppy-reporting/

Re:This article is alarmist rubbish.

[inode_buddha]

Clickable links get more traffic around here. Re-posting the link for you from my login acct because logins tend to have more cred.

Re:This article is alarmist rubbish.

[nmb3000]

This just in: Installing malware is bad for your computer. Film at 11.

What a pile of crap.

Agreed. Frankly this just looks like more FUD against browser addons and a lame attempt to justify Mozilla's looming walled garden and continued Chromification approach to Firefox addons. See also: slow death of the personal computer.

Re:This article is alarmist rubbish.

[Anonymous Coward]

The low level extension mechanism is THE thing that separates FF from other browsers. The only thing left, really. If they eliminate it, there will be no reason left to use FF, and what little market share they have remaining will evaporate.

On the other hand, it will please their advertiser sponsors, because it will become much harder for a FF user to retain privacy from the data harvesters.

Pointing fingers.

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's the way Firefox sandboxes add-ons?.. the article makes it sound like NoScript & friends are the ones directly opening "millions to new attack.." when it just Firefox. So a malicious add-on has to be approved by Firefox's team and then downloaded by some sorry victim?
I don't think your average NoScript user is incompetent enough to download and install your "FreeToolbarFreeExtensionFree2016" add-on. I guess it makes a better story to paint NoScript and other vulnerable add-ons as the bad guys instead of Firefox itself.

QUICK! STOP USING NOSCRIPT!

[Anonymous Coward]

So we can shove the whitelisted ads we extorted money from with AdBlock down your throat!

That's pretty much what popped into my head the second I saw NoScript mentioned in the lead.

I have seen one of these in action

[fhuglegads]

I typed into the search bar in FF and it defaulted to Yahoo instead of Google. I uninstalled because I was afraid it might force me to play Dota instead of League of Legends, drink Pepsi instead of Coke and vote from Trump instead of Bernie. Crisis averted!

Add on developer here

[rsilvergun]

Not looking forward to re-writing my plugin. I might not bother. It's been a fun project but Mozilla is asking me to do a lot of work without much support (so far anyway). They're gonna yank the XUL UI language without there being good replacements (HTML doesn't work right from an addon context because of the security constraints) and take away overlays (that let me access web content without a major mess of code).

That said their reasons aren't too bad and have nothing to do with a walled garden. The addon signing is there to give them a kill switch so that if somebody sells their addon to a malware company and it starts spewing adds they can revoke the signature and shut it down. I get a couple offers a year to "buy" my plugin and figured out pretty quick what they were after (my plugin's under the Moz license, so they could fork it or submit patches to mainline if they just wanted to pitch in).

As for the chromification, that's because they want to make it snappier by doing multi-process. And that means not letting my add on hold up the main thread. Honestly that's the biggest thing holding back my efforts to port to Chrome. It's a nightmare to deal with all the callbacks and such when you can't even hold up the thread for simple things like writing a few bytes of preferences to disk. You don't want to know what I had to do just to get that working... OTOH they're right that it'll make the browser seem snappier. But to be blunt I don't care. I've got an 4 year old A10-5800 and I've yet to be able to do anything in my single threaded Firefox addon that even slows down that old workhorse.

Oh, and yeah, the article is B.S.. Even in Chrome I can call out to executable files that run with the users permissions (basically root if you're a Windows User). It looked like click bait to me so I didn't RTFA.