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Web of Trust makes Chrome even safer

Posted on 19 Aug 2010 at 16:33

Davey Winder takes a look at a community weaving a web of trust

While there’s still no substitute for old-fashioned common sense about online security, I believe certain additions to common sense are in order.

I receive emails from people who insist they’ve never installed any security software, either basic antivirus or full-blown suite, and have never had a malware infection because they never visit dodgy sites or click email links. They are, in other words, perfect web users, perfectly safe from the nasty side of online life.

Everyone running a Windows-based PC needs some help to stay secure these days

But, I say to them, how do you know your computer isn’t infected if you’ve never scanned it? The truth is that everyone running a Windows-based PC needs some help to stay secure these days, that’s a simple fact of online life in the 21st century.

Next line of defence

Consider some kind of antivirus software and firewall as a given, then move on to the next line of defence, which has to be your choice of web browser (and sorry, Microsoft, but that means something besides Internet Explorer, simply because it’s the target for bad guys).

In my never-at-all-humble opinion the best defended browser is Google Chrome, which has sandboxing – a security dream – built right in.

This sandbox ensures that each separate open tab is isolated from all others, running in its own memory area, which prevents malware, hack attacks, buggy code crashes and so on spreading from one tab to another and then into the OS, unlike browsers where they all share the same memory. Running code is kept isolated by a set of virtual resources, which are subject to tight controls.

All fine in theory you might say, but how about in the real world? Well, tab isolation seems to hold up pretty well – if a site crashes, the browser doesn’t and neither does the desktop.

Hard to break

Perhaps more importantly, hackers find it very hard to break, and that includes masters of the art such as Pwn2Own champion Charlie Miller who has a reputation for being able to break any browser’s security in seconds.

Charlie admitted defeat at the last Pwn2Own when it came to Chrome – he did find a vulnerability but was unable to exploit it thanks to the sandbox.

Chrome also has a built-in safe browsing feature that warns you if it detects a site you’re about to visit is suspected of phishing or malware activity.

It does this by downloading a blacklist to your browser containing the hashed URLs of the sites in question, which are compared against hashed URLs of sites you visit.

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