Chrome 63 lets you run individual sites in a sandbox

Posted on Friday, December 08 2017 @ 13:10 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
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Google is rolling out Chrome 63. One of the big new features in this release is site isolation, a sandbox feature that makes it possible to open a website in a completely isolated process. This makes Chrome safer because there's no data sharing with other processes, it offers an extra layer of protection against malicious websites.

Users can activate site isolation on a global or per-site basis. However, be aware that enabling this feature can increase Chrome's memory footprint by about 10-20 percent. Details about how site isolation works can be found at Chromium.
[Site isolation is an effort] to improve Chrome to use sandboxed renderer processes as a security boundary between web sites, even in the presence of Blink vulnerabilities. Our goal is to ensure certain renderer processes contain pages from at most one web site. The browser process can then restrict renderer processes access to cookies and other resources, based on which web sites require dedicated processes.
Besides several security fixes and some other new security related features, Chrome 63 also adds support for the TLS 1.3 and NTLMv2 security protocols. At the moment, TLS 1.3 is only activated for Gmail, more widespread support will follow in 2018.


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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