This quarterly newsletter that Chrome puts out is pretty cool. There's some new Windows 10 security features I hope Mozilla is investigating!
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Parisa Tabriz parisa@chromium.org Date: 3 May 2016 at 19:27 Subject: Q1 Summary from Chrome Security To: Chromium-dev chromium-dev@chromium.org, security-dev security-dev@chromium.org Cc: "security@chromium.org" security@chromium.org, "security-notify@chromium.org" security-notify@chromium.org
Greetings web fans,
For those that don’t know us already, we do stuff to help make Chrome the most secure platform to browse the Internet. Here’s a recap of some work from last quarter:
The Bugs-- effort aims to find (and exterminate) security bugs. On the fuzzing front, we’ve continued to improve the integration between libFuzzer and ClusterFuzz, which allows coverage-guided testing on a per-function basis. With the help of many developers across several teams, we’ve expanded our collection of fuzzing targets in Chromium (that use libFuzzer) to 70! Not all bugs can be found by fuzzing, so we invest effort in targeted code audits too. We wrote a guest post on the Project Zero blog describing one of the more interesting vulnerabilities we discovered. Since we find a lot of bugs, we also want to make them easier to manage. We’ve updated our Sheriffbot tool to simplify the addition of new rules and expanded it to help manage functional bugs in addition just security issues. We’ve also automated assigning security severity recommendations. Finally, we continue to run our vulnerability reward program to recognize bugs discovered from researchers outside of the team. As of M50, we’ve paid out over $2.5 million since the start of the reward program, including over $500,000 in 2015. Our median payment amount for 2015 was $3,000 (up from $2,000 for 2014), and we want to see that increase again this year!
Bugs still happen, so our Guts effort builds in multiple layers of defense. On Android, our seccomp-bpf experiment has been running on the Dev channel and will advance to the Stable and Beta channels with M50.
Chrome on Windows is evolving rapidly in step with the operating system. We shipped four new layers of defense in depth to take advantage of the latest capabilities in Windows 10, some of which patch vulnerabilities found by our own research and feedback! There was great media attention when these changes landed, from Ars Technica to a Risky Business podcast, which said: “There have been some engineering changes to Chrome on Windows 10 which look pretty good. … It’s definitely the go-to browser, when it comes to not getting owned on the internet. And it’s a great example of Google pushing the state of the art in operating systems.”
For our Site Isolation effort, we have expanded our on-going launch trial of --isolate-extensions to include 50% of both Dev Channel and Canary Channel users! This mode uses out-of-process iframes (OOPIFs) to keep dangerous web content out of extension processes. (See here for how to try it.) We've fixed many launch blocking bugs, and improved support for navigation, input events, hit testing, and security features like CSP and mixed content. We improved our test coverage and made progress on updating features like fullscreen, zoom, and find-in-page to work with OOPIFs. We're also excited to see progress on other potential uses of OOPIFs, including the <webview> tag and an experimental "top document isolation" mode.
We spend time building security features that people see. In response to user feedback, we’ve replaced the old full screen prompt with a new, lighter weight ephemeral message in M50 across Windows and Linux. We launched a few bug fixes and updates to the Security panel, which we continue to iterate on and support in an effort to drive forward HTTPS adoption. We also continued our work on removing powerful features on insecure origins (e.g. geolocation).
We’re working on preventing abuse of powerful features on the web. We continue to support great “permissions request” UX, and have started reaching out to top websites to directly help them improve how they request permissions for powerful APIs. To give top-level websites more control over how iframes use permissions, we started external discussions about a new Permission Delegation API. We also extended our vulnerability rewards program to support Safe Browsing reports, in a first program of its kind.
Beyond the browser, our web platform efforts foster cross-vendor cooperation on developer-facing security features. We now have an implementation of Suborigins behind a flag, and have been experimenting with Google developers on usage. We polished up the Referrer Policy spec, refined its integration with ServiceWorker and Fetch, and shipped the `referrerpolicy` attribute from that document. We're excited about the potential of new CSP expressions like 'unsafe-dynamic', which will ship in Chrome 52 (and is experimentally deployed on our shiny new bug tracker). In that same release, we finally shipped SameSite cookies, which we hope will help prevent CSRF. Lastly, we're working to pay down some technical debt by refactoring our Mixed Content implementation and X-Frame-Options to work in an OOPIF world.
We see migration to HTTPS as foundational to any security whatsoever (and we're not the only ones), so we're actively working to drive #MOARTLS across Google and the Internet at large. We worked with a number of teams across Google to help publish an HTTPS Report Card, which aims to hold Google and other top sites accountable, as well as encourage others to encrypt the web. In addition to #MOARTLS, we want to ensure more secure TLS. We mentioned we were working on it last time, but RC4 support is dead! The insecure TLS version fallback is also gone. With help from the libFuzzer folks, we got much better fuzzing coverage on BoringSSL, which resulted in CVE-2016-0705. We ended up adding a "fuzzer mode" to the SSL stack to help the fuzzer get past cryptographic invariants in the handshake, which smoked out some minor (memory leak) bugs. Last, but not least, we rewrote a large chunk of BoringSSL's ASN.1 parsing with a simpler and more standards-compliant stack.
Until next time...
Happy Hacking,
Parisa, on behalf of Chrome Security
P.S. For more thrilling security updates and feisty rants, subscribe to security-dev@chromium.org. You can find older updates at https://dev.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/quarterly-updates.
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