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Google Experiment Tests Top 5 Browsers, Finds Safari Riddled With Security Bugs (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via Bleeping Computer: The Project Zero team at Google has created a new tool for testing browser DOM engines and has unleashed it on today's top five browsers, finding most bugs in Apple's Safari. Results showed that Safari had by far the worst DOM engine, with 17 new bugs discovered after Fratric's test. Second was Edge with 6, then IE and Firefox with 4, and last was Chrome with only 2 new issues. The tests were carried out with a new fuzzing tool created by Google engineers named Domato, also open-sourced on GitHub. This is the third fuzzing tool Google creates and releases into open-source after OSS-Fuzz and syzkaller. Researchers focused on testing DOM engines for vulnerabilities because they expect them to be the next target for browser exploitation after Flash reaches end-of-life in 2020.
It's a system where a SUB is required to create a "safe word" 6 to 14 characters long containing at least one capital letter, at least on numeric digit, and at least one punctuation mark.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
Fuzzers are pretty impartial, and I don't find it hard to believe that the Chromium/Chrome team is the best at security.
Funny because I also use Safari and I run Adblock - right now in fact. There are tons of extensions and privacy features. The ad industry is up in arms about the latest Safari feature - no allowing the ad networks to track you across different web sites. I suspect you don't use Safari at all because you don't know anything about it. Do you work for Google or Microsoft?
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
DOM = Document Object Model
The DOM engine is what is responsible for parsing HTML/CSS, converting it into a tree, and then rendering the tree to the client area in the browser. It's essentially the core of the browser and presents a programmatic API along with JavaScript. It may also be used to render UI elements. For example, all of Chrome's plugins use HTML/CSS to create the menus you see in the options and menu screens.
Apple. On iOS, all browsers (even Chrome) are actually running Safari's rendering engine, with the exception of browsers that run all the JavaScript server-side. The reason for this is that Apple won't let apps run non-Apple JavaScript engines out of concerns about security. (The irony here is not lost on me.)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Fuzzers are pretty impartial, and I don't find it hard to believe that the Chromium/Chrome team is the best at security.
Also, I know a couple of people on the Project Zero team, and they treat Google absolutely different from anyone else. They attack everything, regardless of origin, with equal gusto and skill and have a strict, no-exceptions-ever 90-day public disclosure policy. I work on Android and Project Zero has even 0day'd us a couple of times, publishing existing vulns in Android that we haven't gotten fixed within the 90 day window.
It's interesting working with PZ team members directly because even though they're Google employees, they are not subject to the standard employee NDA. More than one time I've had one of them stop me mid-sentence to remind me that they are not allowed to hear non-public information... and that if I tell them anyway they are not obligated to keep it secret.
Project Zero is employed by Google, but that means nothing to them. And, strangely enough, Google is totally fine with that.
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