One of the main reasons why Firefox has become so successful is its extension framework, and the large community of extensions developers that has grown around it. What many users are not aware of, however, is that extensions are a bit of a security nightmare.
Post a Comment
Member since:
2005-08-27
Any third party extension, just like a third party application, does not have to go through the same code review or testing that may or may not happen by the vendor.
From the article, there is at least one vulnerability against an arbitrary extension to attack the noscript extension's whitelist. Malware writers are aware of the safeguards that users install and thus are making inroads to the weaker links in our chains of armor.
You hear often that what gives Firefox the edge over other browsers are the extension, and so this is the biggest hurdle security-wise. The same can almost be said for Windows especially in the business world.
Member since:2007-09-06
Member since:
2009-06-25
The recent video on ChromeOS security
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9WVmNfgjtQ&feature=player_embedded
takes the sandboxing quite seriously. Maybe the Mozilla developers could have a look at the Chrome security model (which works even better on a device that has ChromeOS, due to trusted booting, etc.), which I'm sure they are....
Member since:2009-07-10
One of the current projects at Mozilla is called Electrolysis, and it's working at moving page rendering and plugins into separate processes so they can operate separately from the browser UI, effectively giving the browser the same security profile as Chrome. I think we're aiming for FF 3.7 for this, but it might be 4.0 since moving things to separate processes will break a lot of the methods extensions use to interact with the browser.
Member since:2005-12-15
Member since:
2009-04-24
Member since:
2009-11-24
The Yoono vulnerability in this article was fixed in Yoono 6.2 which was released in August. You can download it at http://www.yoono.com
