On Fri, Jan 18, 2008 at 09:30:01PM +0200, Jussi Peltola wrote: > Most of the replies are missing the point. You do not only want to > protect the rest of your system from your browser. You also want > to avoid your browser doing anything an attacker wants when he > finds an exploit in it. > > If you try to solve the problem with virtualization, different > users or another solution like that, you would have to run > multiple browsers for different sites to avoid browser exploits > causing trouble. Of course, it is always better to run network > applications as a different user than yourself, but browser > exploits are somewhat hard to contain that way since the things > attackers want may be in the browser itself (cookies or, hopefully > not, saved passwords). > > I have to restate what I wrote in another thread: looking at the > security record of the popular browsers it is scary we use them > for online banking and other security-critical functions so > carelessly in our everyday life.
This is why I use Firefox for general web browsing (although I too use a separate "safe" browser profile for financial stuff). The NoScript and Cookie Monster extensions make it relatively easy to manage site whitelists for scripting and cookie permissions in Firefox, respectively, and NoScript also lets you selectively allow Flash and other plugins, which can help ease concerns about Flash cookies and other potential privacy issues. And if you must allow Google to keep session cookies on your browser, the Customize Google extension can randomize your UID after each query in order to prevent Google from building a comprehensive record of your Web searches. So Firefox might not be the very best browser with respect to buffer overflows and other local application security issues, but if you stick it in a chroot jail and install a few of its better extensions, you'll have one of most "secure" browsing experiences available, taking into account both remote code execution and generic web privacy / XSS / XSRF threats. (Just make sure to set `network.cookie.cookieBehavior=1` and especially `network.prefetch-next=false` in `about:config` before you go anywhere... come on, Mozilla, what the heck happened to sensible defaults? Take a cue from the OpenBSD team ;) ) -- Mark Shroyer http://markshroyer.com/contact/
