Re:Slimium: Debloating the Chromium Browser with Feature Sub...
by hcs on Monday November 09, 2020 @08:03PM
(#25041839)
They replace it with some illegal instruction, so the process crashes. With a lot of logic running in per-origin processes, this may only bring down one tab instead of the whole browser.
Edit: Or maybe the error handling can avoid killing a process? This is what the paper says, but I feel like a child process would almost certainly be killed:
> Code elimination is trivial because we nullify unused code with illegal instructions based on known binary function boundaries. Once the instructions triggers a Chromium’s error handling routine that catches an exception, an error page shows an “Aw, Snap!” message by default instead of crashing a whole Chromium process. (section 5, p467)
Edit: Or maybe the error handling can avoid killing a process? This is what the paper says, but I feel like a child process would almost certainly be killed:
> Code elimination is trivial because we nullify unused code with illegal instructions based on known binary function boundaries. Once the instructions triggers a Chromium’s error handling routine that catches an exception, an error page shows an “Aw, Snap!” message by default instead of crashing a whole Chromium process. (section 5, p467)