Category Archives: security

Updating Browsers Quickly: Flags, Respins, and Components

By this point, most browser enthusiasts know that Chrome has a rapid release cycle, releasing a new stable version of the browser approximately every six weeks. The Edge team intends to adopt that rapid release cadence for our new browser, and we’re already releasing new Edge Dev Channel builds every week. What might be lessContinue reading “Updating Browsers Quickly: Flags, Respins, and Components”

Protect Your Accounts with 2FA

You should enable “2-Step Verification” for logins to your Google account. Google Authenticator is an app that runs on your iOS or Android phone and gives out 6 digit codes that must be entered when you log in on a device. This can’t really prevent phishing (because a phishing page will just ask you forContinue reading “Protect Your Accounts with 2FA”

Securely Displaying URLs

One of my final projects on the Chrome team was writing an internal document outlining Best Practices for Secure URL Display. Yesterday, it got checked into the public Chromium repro, so if this is a topic that interests you, please have a look! Additionally, at Enigma 2019, the Chrome team released Trickuri (pronounced “trickery”) a tool forContinue reading “Securely Displaying URLs”

Private Browsing Mode

Note: This blog post was written before the new Chromium-based Microsoft Edge was announced. As a consequence, it mostly discusses the behavior of the Legacy Microsoft Edge browser. The new Chromium-based Edge behaves largely the same way as Google Chrome. InPrivate Mode was introduced in Internet Explorer 8 with the goal of helping users improveContinue reading “Private Browsing Mode”

An Update on the Edge XSS Filter

In Windows 10 RS5 (aka the “October 2018 Update”), the venerable XSS Filter first introduced in 2008 with IE8 was removed from Microsoft Edge. The XSS Filter debuted in a time before Content Security Policy as a part of a basket of new mitigations designed to mitigate the growing exploitation of cross-site scripting attacks, joining older features like HTTPOnlyContinue reading “An Update on the Edge XSS Filter”

CORS and Vary

Yesterday, I started looking a site compatibility bug where a page’s layout is intermittently busted. Popping open the F12 Tools on the failing page, we see that a stylesheet is getting blocked because it lacks a CORS Access-Control-Allow-Origin response header: We see that the client demands the header because the LINK element that references itContinue reading “CORS and Vary”

Edge EV UI Requires SmartScreen

A user recently noticed that when loading Paypal.com in Microsoft Edge, the UI shown was the default HTTPS UI (a gray lock): Instead of the fancier “green” UI shown for servers that present Extended Validation (EV) certificates: The user observed this on some Windows 10 machines but not others. The variable that differed between those machines wasContinue reading “Edge EV UI Requires SmartScreen”

Stop Spilling the Beans

I’ve written about Same Origin Policy a bunch over the years, with a blog series mapping it to the Read/Write/Execute mental model. More recently, I wrote about why Content-Type headers matter for same-origin-policy enforcement. I’ve just read a great paper on cross-origin infoleaks and current/future mitigations. If you’re interested in browser security, it’s definitely worth a read.

Building your .APP website with NameCheap and GitHub Pages–A Visual Guide

I recently bought a few new domain names under the brand new .app top-level-domain (TLD). The .app TLD is awesome because it’s on the HSTSPreload list, meaning that browsers will automatically use only HTTPS for every request on every domain under .app, keeping connections secure and improving performance. I’m not doing anything terribly exciting withContinue reading “Building your .APP website with NameCheap and GitHub Pages–A Visual Guide”