Protecting more with Site Isolation

This article has been indexed from Google Online Security Blog

Posted by Charlie Reis and Alex Moshchuk, Chrome Security Team

Chrome’s Site Isolation is an essential security defense that makes it harder for malicious web sites to steal data from other web sites. On Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS, Site Isolation protects all web sites from each other, and also ensures they do not share processes with extensions, which are more highly privileged than web sites. As of Chrome 92, we will start extending this capability so that extensions can no longer share processes with each other. This provides an extra line of defense against malicious extensions, without removing any existing extension capabilities.

Meanwhile, Site Isolation on Android currently focuses on protecting only high-value sites, to keep performance overheads low. Today, we are announcing two Site Isolation improvements that will protect more sites for our Android users. Starting in Chrome 92, Site Isolation will apply to sites where users log in via third-party providers, as well as sites that carry Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy headers.

Our ongoing goal with Site Isolation for Android is to offer additional layers of security without adversely affecting the user experience for resource-constrained devices. Site Isolation for all sites continues to be too costly for most Android devices, so our strategy is to improve heuristics for prioritizing sites that benefit most from added protection. So far, Chrome has been isolating sites where users log in by entering a password. However, many sites allow users to authenticate on a third-party site (for example, sites that offer “Sign in with Google”), possibly without the user ever typing in a password. This is most commonly accomplished with the industry-standard OAuth protocol. Starting in Chrome 92, Site Isolation will recognize common OAuth interactions and protect sites relying on OAuth-based login, so that user data is safe however a user chooses to authenticate.

Additionally, Chrome will now trigger Site Isolation based on the new Cros

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