I suggest you uninstall Chrome if that is your view, it too will lead to a full system compromise in the future, I mean it will in the future yet again.
> Most software doesn't run with full system privileges
For most people, yes it does.
> go out of its way to interact with malicious content
Your browser also does.
> difference between AV and any other shitty software is that AV is massively more useful and abundant as attack surface.
The browser pretty much wins here too.
But no, it's AV vendors fault your browser is such a risk.
Chrome developers take active measures (sandboxing, research, patching, bug bounties) to secure their browser. They have done amazing work and really, in my mind, pushed some solid technology that we've all benefited from (seccomp, as an example).
AV has gone out of its way to disable modern security technologies like ASLR/Stack Cookies.
There is no comparison here in terms of effort to avoid exploitation. As Justin said - find me a single AV that sandboxes its parsers.
> For most people, yes it does.
Even if this were true, and it is not, Chrome doesn't - it runs in a sandbox. Therefor a compromise of an AV is not just a jump to Admin but a jump out of the sandbox.
> The browser pretty much wins here too.
Not really. The majority of attack surface in a browser like Chrome is isolated and hardened. Web browsers avoid malicious content where possible. AV goes out of its way to interact with malicious content.
> But no, it's AV vendors fault your browser is such a risk.
It's AV vendors fault that they avoid writing secure software. And, yeah actually, it is AV vendors fault that the browser is vulnerable when the browser takes every step to stay secure and AV vendors shit all over that.
bug bounties
That's not even a little true. Even inexperienced Windows users have to click that little "permission to make changes" button, and sometimes "run as administrator". Winamp, Solitaire, and all your other random not-totally-secure programs don't offer kernel access to whoever compromises them. AV is a singularly good source of privilege escalation attacks for exactly that reason.
Examples?
> I suggest you uninstall Chrome if that is your view, it too will lead to a full system compromise in the future, I mean it will in the future yet again.
> The browser pretty much wins here too.
Chrome is tightly sandboxed; any exploit in Chrome is very unlikely to compromise your OS.
Most software doesn't run with full system privileges, go out of its way to interact with malicious content, and inject itself all over the system. The difference between AV and any other shitty software is that AV is massively more useful and abundant as attack surface.
The hooks into the browser are nothing. It isn't the hooking, though that's not great. Imagine Chrome provided an API. OK, so now the AV listens to the API. It sees you open some file in the browser that's XML - it parses the XML. It gets exploited, trivially, because many vendors explicitly disable security features like stack cookies. Now the attacker went from a sandboxed environment to a full system privileges process.