Chrome – text/plain

Security Surfaces

An important concept in Usable Security is whether a given UI represents a “security surface.” Formally, a security surface is a User Interface component in which the user is presented with information they rely upon to make a security decision. For example, in the browser, the URL in the address bar is a security surface.Continue reading “Security Surfaces”

Family Safety Content Filtering

Microsoft Family Safety is a feature of Windows that allows parents to control their children’s access to apps and content in Windows. The feature is tied to the user accounts of the parent(s) and child(ren). When I visit https://family.microsoft.com and log in with my personal Microsoft Account, I’m presented with the following view: The “Nate”Continue reading “Family Safety Content Filtering”

ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT and HTML5 Sandbox

Recently, many Microsoft employees taking training courses have reported problems accessing documents linked to in those courses in Chrome and Edge. In Edge, the screen looks like this: But the problem isn’t limited to Microsoft’s internal training platform, and can be easily reproduced in Chrome: What’s going on? There are a number of root causesContinue reading “ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT and HTML5 Sandbox”

Mouse Gestures in Edge

Over twenty years ago, the Opera browser got me hooked on mouse gestures, a way for you to perform common browser actions quickly. After I joined the IE team in 2004, I fell in love with a browser extension written by Ralph Hare and I later blogged about it on the IEBlog and helped RalphContinue reading “Mouse Gestures in Edge”

Browser Security Bugs that Aren’t: JavaScript in PDF

A fairly common security bug report is of the form: “I can put JavaScript inside a PDF file and it runs!” For example, open this PDF file with Chrome, and you can see the alert(1) message displayed: Support for JavaScript within PDFs is by-design and expected by the developers of PDF rendering software, including commonContinue reading “Browser Security Bugs that Aren’t: JavaScript in PDF”