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Is Google Chrome the Safest Web Browser? Hackers Seem to Think So.

by Terrence O'Brien on March 24, 2009 at 04:56 PM

Hackers Don't Even Want to Mess With Chrome
Google: 1, Hackers: 0.

The game is far from over, but right now, Google has a pretty firm upper hand in the battle over browser security supremacy.

This past week, hackers were invited to the CanSecWest security conference, where they were encouraged to break browsers and bend them to their wills. While Firefox and Internet Explorer were both hacked and exploited, it was Apple's Safari that took a particularly hard spanking. It was the most popular target at the event and, according to Charlie Miller (of MacBook Air hacking fame), the browser with the most easily exploitable vulnerabilities. It seems that Apple's OS X isn't nearly as secure as Cupertino fan boys would have you believe.

But the big winner of the day was Google. The search giant's young Chrome browser walked away from the conference unscathed, due mainly to the fact that the intimidated hackers steered clear of it entirely. According to Miller, Chrome poses a particular challenge since it runs inside of a "sandbox," meaning it doesn't interact with a computer's operating system. So not only does a hacker have to find a vulnerability in the browser, but he or she also has to find a vulnerability in the sandbox before he or she then figures out how to exploit both.

It's not that Chrome is bug-free; it's just that the browser makes it particularly difficult for bad actors to take advantage of them. For the moment at least, Chrome sits atop the browser pile when it comes to security. [From: ZDNet]

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Tags: browser, browser wars, BrowserWars, cansecwest, chrome, security, top, web browser, WebBrowser

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