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Firefox and Chrome Pull Popular Browser Extension Stylish From Their Stores After Report Claimed It Logs and Shares Browsing History, Credentials
sombragris writes: Stylish, a popular extension available for Chrome and Firefox which allows for easy customization of any website, now phones home and shares its users' browser history with its corporate parent, according to blogger Robert Heaton. This prompted Firefox to ban the extension from its addons site and prompt all users to disable it. The discussion can be seen in the relevant bug report. In Heaton's words:
Stylish is no longer a well-meaning product with your best interests at heart. If you use and like Stylish, please uninstall it and switch to an alternative like Stylus, an offshoot from the good old version of Stylish that works in much the same way, minus the spyware.
Google too has pulled the extension from its extension store. This is not the first time Stylish is at the centre of a privacy debacle
We now live in "The Internet Economy" where everything is based on "monetizing" the customer.
Extentions need to be protected. We need to have a last known good backup system in place for extentions at risk of being hijacked.
What sad is many will say me included at one time ya get what ya pay for so them become scummy isn't a surprise. The problem is even if you PAY for a product take Windows 10, ya it was free but its not free anymore and the paid version is no different then the unpaid version. All the spyware,data mining,loss of control over ones own setting and program choices are in the PAID version. The one that may allow users to fully control isn't sold to the general public. Point is, paying for stinking product don't exclude the data spying you kinda expect from Free crap. We need to get off our lazy butts and start putting pressure on congress to get back the privacy that was taken from us and ya we allowed them.
Jack of all trades,master of none
The title suggests that not just browsing history but credentials are uploaded. The latter is potentially much worse than the former. Does anyone have verifiable data on exactly what was uploaded? Does everyone who got caught out by this need to reset their IDs/passwords/whatever on every site they visited while using the extension? Or every site they've ever visited and allowed their browser to store login credentials?
The new owners could be in pretty deep brown stuff anyway given that this sort of behaviour without explicit consent is now very illegal throughout Europe, but if they were stealing credentials then it would be prudent to reset everything, which of course could mean dozens or hundreds of different sites for some people.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
There is a plague in the modern tech industry, where everything from browser extensions to microlibraries for your favourite programming language is written by someone you've never met, supplied via some sort of centralised repository or distribution channel that you trust instead, and then winds up on your machine doing who-knows-what because that trusted distribution mechanism missed something, or even because the trusted developer of some code you're running, which you downloaded via a trusted source, itself trusted someone else unwisely.
The solution to this isn't just proper validation of where the code you're downloading actually came from, it's also to have security models more sophisticated than the 1980s in the Internet age. For example, why the hell could a browser extension that was there to modify the appearance of pages you were visiting suddenly choose to upload anything to the mothership without requiring additional permissions?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Why do companies / people do this when there is *100 percent chance* that they will be discovered and excommunicated from the Internet Universe? One would think they would be a little more sneaky about it.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
As the summary notes, stylish has been suspicious for a while. I switched to stylus last time and have been more than happy with it.
Yes, you can do all kinds of things if the browser lets you. But there is no reason a browser couldn't simply impose a 100% firewall by default and let any extensions that genuinely do have a need to do something like your example ask for explicit permission. I would argue that the sort of behaviour you illustrated is relatively unusual for browser extensions, while sadly trying to exfiltrate data no longer is.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I was using stylish for quite some-time. I'm disappointed that this kind of breaking of trust occurred with that extension. I've now switched over to stylus instead. It works great (even better than stylish). It seems to behave better, have a better UI, and more stability. So, if you're unsure what to use, definitely give stylus a try.
the real blame lies squarely with the FF devs.
Wrong.
On what fscking planet is there justification for ALLOWING an extension to access history in the first place?!
For examples, try searching for Firefox extensions involving history.
Maybe there needs to be some kind of permissions system for extensions so that the user is prompted to grant access to things like history, credentials, form fields, user key-strokes, etc. Until there is, understand that you need to trust your extensions just as much as you have to trust the browser itself. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
As the grandparent pointed out, you haven't solved anything.
Even if the plugin is only allowed to insert valid css into the page, it can send information back to any site on the internet, by using css properties which take url values, including background. The ability to send data to an arbitrary server is implicit in the ability to inject css into a page.
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
Stylish still exists? We moved on years ago to Tampermonkey.
Kriston
People are concerned with the Cambridge Analytica stuff, where an app scrapes essentially publically-made data of users, but browser extensions are far scarier. If granted the right permissions, they have free reign on scraping password data. I imagine far more extensions are doing it.
Maybe there needs to be some kind of permissions system for extensions so that the user is prompted to grant access to things like history, credentials, form fields, user key-strokes, etc.
There is. That's part of the new extension system. The concept of permissions is fundamentally at odds with the old extensions system and was one of reasons for the new extension system.
Unfortunately, as pointed out elsewhere in this thread, there's no way to implement Stylish such that it doesn't have the rights to leak every URL you visit, since it can just add extra CSS that sends that information back via loading an image on its remote server. Of course, uMatrix or similar could block such a thing, but that's definitely a tool for advanced users.
Are you sure you aren't confusing Stylish with Scriptish?
This is true if you allow insertion of arbitrary CSS (or running of arbitrary code that can trigger requests via JS etc.) and then process it with no questions asked. However, browsers already deal with related concerns in areas like the same-origin policy and CORS. They could apply similar safeguards to locally generated requests.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Someone needs to start a peer-review system for firefox extensions.
The other day I installed a gestures extension and reviewed the source code myself before installing it for possible telemetry leaking. I didn't have any and it would be nice to upload my results to a website.
If someone made it nice like stackexchange with points I bet it would take off.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
Is this not a crime? Who perpetrated it? Or did everyone who installed the extension agree to a EULA explaining that it did this? If so, I believe the problem is the existence of a EULA. They are too long and complex, nobody reads them, and so they have all kinds of stuff in them. Since people agree to them automatically, they lose their rights to use the legal system that should be punishing these criminals.
Nope, Tampermonkey et.al are supersets of the functionality provided by Stylish.
Kriston
Sure, this is clearly a shitty thing for an extension to do - but the real blame lies squarely with the FF devs. On what fscking planet is there justification for ALLOWING an extension to access history in the first place?!
Your criticism is misdirected. Stylish does not need to access your browsing history (something that Firefox can block). But Stylish is designed to be active on every page that you visit so that it can apply custom styles for that site or tell you if some user styles exist for that site, Stylish sees every page that you visit, so it can collect and transmit its own view of your history. And unfortunately, that history can include some sensitive information as explained in the article.
-Raphaël