Tech Radar
Google Chrome extensions stay a safety threat as Manifest V3 fails to forestall information theft and malware exploitation
Nov
- Analysis exhibits that Manifest V3 might endure from safety points
- The upgraded Chromium manifest nonetheless permits malicious extensions
- Some security instruments wrestle to determine harmful extensions
Browser extensions have lengthy been a handy device for customers, enhancing productivity and streamlining duties. Nevertheless, they’ve additionally develop into a chief goal for malicious actors seeking to exploit vulnerabilities, focusing on each particular person customers and enterprises.
Regardless of efforts to boost safety, many of those extensions have discovered methods to take advantage of loopholes in Google’s newest extension framework, Manifest V3 (MV3).
Current analysis by SquareX has revealed how these rogue extensions can nonetheless bypass key safety measures, exposing hundreds of thousands of customers to dangers akin to information theft, malware, and unauthorized entry to delicate info.
Browser extensions now pose higher threats
Google has all the time struggled with the problems of extensions in Chrome. In June 2023, the corporate needed to manually remove 32 exploitable extensions that have been put in 72 million instances earlier than they have been taken down.
Google’s earlier extension framework, Manifest Model 2 (MV2), was notoriously problematic. It usually granted extreme permissions to extensions and allowed scripts to be injected with out consumer consciousness, making it simpler for attackers to steal information, access delicate info, and introduce malware.
In response, Google launched Manifest V3, which aimed to tighten safety by limiting permissions and requiring extensions to declare their scripts prematurely. Whereas MV3 was anticipated to resolve the vulnerabilities current in MV2, SquareX’s analysis exhibits that it falls brief in important areas.
Malicious extensions constructed on MV3 can nonetheless bypass security measures and steal reside video streams from collaboration platforms like Google Meet and Zoom Net while not having particular permissions. They will additionally add unauthorized collaborators to personal GitHub repositories, and even redirect customers to phishing pages disguised as password managers.
Moreover, these malicious extensions can entry shopping historical past, cookies, bookmarks, and obtain historical past, in an identical technique to their MV2 counterparts, by inserting a pretend software program replace pop-up that methods customers into downloading the malware.
As soon as the malicious extension is put in, people and enterprises can’t detect the actions of those extensions, leaving them uncovered. Safety options like endpoint protection, Safe Entry Service Edge (SASE), and Secure Web Gateways (SWG) can’t dynamically assess browser extensions for potential dangers.
To handle these challenges, SquareX has developed a number of options aimed toward enhancing browser extension safety. Their method consists of fine-tuned insurance policies that enable directors to determine which extensions to dam or allow based mostly on components akin to extension permissions, replace historical past, evaluations, and consumer scores.
This resolution can block community requests made by extensions in real-time, based mostly on insurance policies, machine studying insights, and heuristic evaluation. Moreover, SquareX is experimenting with dynamic evaluation of Chrome extensions utilizing a modified Chromium browser on its cloud server, offering deeper insights into the conduct of probably dangerous extensions.
“Browser extensions are a blind spot for EDR/XDR and SWGs don’t have any technique to infer their presence,” famous Vivek Ramachandran, Founder & CEO of SquareX.
This has made browser extensions a really efficient and potent method to silently be put in and monitor enterprise customers, and attackers are leveraging them to observe communication over internet calls, act on the sufferer’s behalf to provide permissions to exterior events, steal cookies and different website information and so forth.”
“Our analysis proves that with out dynamic evaluation and the flexibility for enterprises to use stringent insurance policies, it won’t be attainable to determine and block these assaults. Google MV3, although nicely supposed, continues to be distant from imposing safety at each a design and implementation part,” Ramachandran added.
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