Microsoft researchers are developing a new Web browser that they say could offer a far greater degree of security than Google's Chrome, Mozilla's Firefox or Microsoft's own Internet Explorer.
The browser, called Gazelle, relies on 5,000 lines of C# code called a "browser kernel" that helps enforce security rules to prevent malicious access to the PC's underlying operating system, according to a recently published paper.
So far, Gazelle is just a prototype, with other parts of the browser based on Microsoft's IE. Due to the complex nature of the way it processes Web pages for better security, the browser's performance is more tortoise than gazelle, but the researchers think a few tweaks can make it faster.
Gazelle is different from some other browsers in that it considers each part of a Web site -- such as iframes, subframes, and plug-ins -- as separate elements. Some of those elements can pull in malicious content from other Web sites. Google's Chrome runs a Web page and its elements in a single process.
The Microsoft researchers argues that their approach brings more reliability and better security since processes can't interact with the underlying system and are mediated by system calls supplied by the browser kernel.
In the paper, the Microsoft researchers are surprisingly critical of the company's forthcoming Web browser, IE8, which uses an approach similar to Chrome by using tabs to isolate processes.
"This granularity is insufficient since a user may browse multiple mutually distrusting sites in a single tab, and a web page may contain an iframe with content from an untrusted site (e.g., ads)," the paper reads.
Gazelle goes so far as to separate elements of a Web page that come from the same registrar-controlled domain. For example, content from ad.datacenter.com and user.datacenter.com would be considered separate, whereas Chrome "puts them into the same site instance," the paper said.
Another interesting feature of Gazelle is aimed at blocking so-called race condition attacks. In that scenario, an attacker creates a Web page aimed at making a user click on an area of the page. But just before the predicted click happens, an overlay is drawn into the page, which could cause a user to be attacked.
Gazelle will ignore any clicks in newly exposed screen areas for about one second until a user can see the new screen areas.
Source: InfoWorld
