Firefox security updates seem to make online safer than before
Mozilla is currently testing the main new security features for its Firefox browser which will separate each website into its own process.
Site insulation is designed to prevent sideways attacks such as specter in the popular open source browser.
In a blog post, Anny Gachokidze, a senior platform engineer in Mozilla who worked on site isolation, explained that he built a new security architecture that expanded the current protection mechanism of the browser by making it containing each site in the operating system process itself.
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“To fully protect your personal information, modern web browsers not only need to provide protection in the application layer but also need to fully separate memory space from different sites – the architecture of new site insulation security in Firefox provides the security guarantee,” Wrinked theHokidze.
Joint process
In the current scheme, after Launching Firefox started the special parent process, which further raises eight processes for web content, and a maximum of two additional semi-special web content processes, along with four utility processes for web extensions, GPU, network operations, and decoding media.
Gachhokidze explained that while separating the content into eight processes quite safe by itself, this setting still allows for evil sites placed in the same process with other trusted sites.
Because all websites are in the same memory sharing process, sites that are unreliable will be able to read shared memory content. It becomes very dangerous when you consider the fact that all online ads, and packed pages are placed into the same process as the parent page.
Isolated silo.
However, with site insulation, not only all websites in their own processes, each embedded element that is not part of the same site will also allocate their own processes.
In addition to the safety benefits of such settings, it also includes some other advantages.
For starters, using more processes to load websites will allow Firefox efficiently using available resources by spreading work in various CPU cores. Also, thanks to a siled approach, the Crash tab will not have an impact on the website loaded in different processes.
The site isolation feature is currently being tested on every night and Beta Build Browser, and will enter the release stable when the developer considers it stable.