Researchers have discovered a flaw that exposes Google’s Chrome web browser to clickjacking. Clickjacking is a relatively new attack vector in which a legitimate link is substituted without the user’s awareness. Clicking a photo that appears to be hosted on Flickr, for example, could actually direct the user to a malicious site set up as a drive-by-download server. The severity of the problem becomes compounded when trusted sites are hacked into and surreptitiously modified.
Google is working on a fix. In the meantime, though a spokesperson pointed out that clickjacking is a problem that can affect all browsers. Indeed Firefox 3.0.5 appears to suffer from this same flaw; however, the first release candidate of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 and Opera are not affected.
Roger A. Grimes, PC World
Google Chrome was built from the ground up to be a more secure Web browser, and Google and its Chromium developers should be applauded for the attention they have brought to browser security. Google deserves much credit for the wealth of security information posted on the Internet and on the Google Chrome blog, and for making Chrome’s source code available for anyone to examine.
The security model Chrome follows is excellent. Chrome separates the main browser program, called the browser kernel, from the rendering processes, which are based upon the open source WebKit engine, also used by Apple’s Safari. The browser kernel starts with all privileges removed, the null SID (a security identifier in Windows Vista that denotes the user as untrusted), and multiple "restrict" and "deny" SIDs enabled. On Windows Vista, Chrome runs as a medium-integrity process.
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