Re:Firefox 95 might be the most secure web browser on the ma...
by murderfs on Friday December 10, 2021 @07:22AM
(#29509026)
Sandboxing libraries with webasm is an interesting step forward, but on the whole, Firefox is still way behind chromium in security. There's still a massive amount of memory-unsafe code in Firefox, and the granularity and quality of the sandboxing ranges from significantly worse to comically worthless relative to chrome, depending on platform (e.g. audio, GPU, and network all live in the same process on linux, and escaping from that process is essentially trivial, because it has an X11 socket).
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Re:Firefox 95 might be the most secure web browser on the ma...
by 0xdeadb00f on Friday December 10, 2021 @08:08AM
(#29509380)
Thank you for this. Most people don't realise just how much effort has gone into securing chromium (and therefore chrome) and/or they conflate privacy and security.
One question, you mention memory unsafe code. Is chromium not written in C++? Isn't that still considered an "unsafe" language?
Re:Firefox 95 might be the most secure web browser on the ma...
by murderfs on Friday December 10, 2021 @08:28AM
(#29509567)
Yes, Chromium is basically entirely memory unsafe modulo mitigations [1], with the exception of some codecs being generated from a memory safe language. I meant that the memory safe parts of Firefox are a very small minority: it's also an enormous pile of memory unsafe C++.
1: There's a very clever project that'll protect against use after free that's being worked on right now: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1m0c63vXXLyGtIGBi9v6YFANu...
With that and memory tagging, the vast majority of vulnerabilities go from remote code execution to just denial of service.