Scripps Employees Called 'Hackers' For Exposing Massive Security Flaw
Suspected PayPal Hackers Seek Deal To Stay Out Of Prison
Google Chrome sandboxes Flash for more secure browsing
That's one big advantage to Google Chrome's internal Flash plug-in. Since updates are delivered silently in the background to users, the internal plug-in is always up-to-date. This keeps everyone as safe as possible, but Chrome offers one more way to protect its users: sandboxing. By running unfamiliar Web code in its isolated sandbox, Chrome can execute that code in a safe environment -- where it can't harm your operating system.
Back when Google first announced internal Flash, one of their stated goals was "to further protect users by extending Chrome's 'sandbox' to web pages with Flash content." According to revision 66022, Google is making good on their promise. Sandboxed Flash is now supported in the Chromium source code, and should be available to Windows users of Canary and Chrome Dev very soon. A quick look through the source code seems to indicate that Chrome can sandbox not only its own internal Flash plug-in, but also the traditional Adobe version -- as long as it's version 10.1.103.19 or better.
This is great news for Chrome users. It was already an incredibly difficult browser to exploit, and sandboxing Flash will add another layer of armor to its defenses.
Comments
4
Subscribe to commentsrob2b2003ukNov 15th 2010 8:01AM
another reason why chrome rules. Only thing that annoys me on chrome is the inability to open files from the web, other than that its pure awesome.
SlashZakuNov 15th 2010 11:28AM
I'd like to use Chrome but it just runs sluggish for me on the computers I've used it on (an Inspiron 600m and a Dimension 2300, both with 512MB of RAM). It'll act like it's loading a page and take forever to do so. The Dev/Canary builds work best but the Beta and Stable aren't worth using for some reason (the former 2 still pull the whole page loading thing from time to time).
jkroederNov 15th 2010 8:59AM
I've already been sandboxing plugins in Chrome using the "--safe-plugins" switch. I wonder if this new method will provide any benefit.
DanNov 16th 2010 1:47AM
And another (and very significant) argument against using Flash dies. Use this together with click2flash and you can use the full web with no drawbacks. Why can't Apple do this for the iOS? It's all about maximising their appstore profits I guess, and to hell with the users that actually want (or need) to access content in anything other than what they approve.
I agree with some of the other posters here, Google rocks and is showing the old guard (Microsoft and Apple) how things should be done in the modern world.