Re: Fwd: [friam] Could you/somebody make a safe browser?

On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 1:48 PM, Raoul Duke <[email protected]> wrote:

> >> If you could start from scratch, could you use a better architecture &
> design to make a fundamentally safer web browser?


To wash it all away, eh? ;)
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/ToWashItAllAway.pdf

A lot of attention is placed on classical web vulnerabilities like XSS,
CSRF, cookies, etc, and those things are definitely huge problems...

But I think the biggest problem is that Web Browsers, JavaScript VMs, and
plugins like Flash are all extremely complicated projects with millions
upon millions of lines of code written in memory unsafe languages like
C/C++. Because of this there is an endless cycle of remote code execution
vulnerabilities. Every Apple SA, for example, contains at least a half
dozen remote code execution vulnerabilities in WebKit and associated
plugins (e.g. image format parsers, PDF processing, compression). For a
long time Flash was a nearly ubiquitous platform that happened to be a
horrific codebase full of severe security issues.

I think the sorts of appsec 101-style web vulnerabilities that most people
tend to focus on form quite a small portion of a browser's potential attack
surface, and until we can stem the flood of remote code execution
vulnerabilities and sandbox escapes, the web will never be a secure
platform.

This is why I really like the work that Mozilla is doing with their new
Servo rendering engine, written in Rust, a memory-safe language which uses
a region typing system to manage memory instead of a garbage collector.
Building browsers on a memory safe foundation seems like the first step
towards creating a safe web browser.

-- 
Tony Arcieri

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