LibreWolf is a great privacy oriented Browser for desktop. But there is no version for android or IOS . There are some like mull but they have their own problems. Mobile phones stay with us most of the day. So we need extra privacy for it.
LibreWolf is a great privacy oriented Browser for desktop. But there is no version for android or IOS . There are some like mull but they have their own problems. Mobile phones stay with us most of the day. So we need extra privacy for it.
Interesting. What security risks are you talking about exactly? Do you have a link?
I know Chromium is faster and more responsive on Android but I haven’t read much about security differences yet. With Chromium being pre-installed and signed by the OS vendor, I always assumed the risk of exploiting the Chromium process was higher instead of lower.
I’m not sure what threat model you’re protecting yourself from if the Android sandbox isn’t good enough for either to be honest, but I suppose there’s risk in hijacking the browser too.
See the replies below regarding per-site process isolation.
I see. I don’t think missing that is enough of a problem for me to switch browsers, it is rather unfortunate that it’s still missing on Android.
It means that one malicious site can compromise your entire phone.
No it doesn’t? It means that a malicious site that can take over a browser process can also take over connections/accounts on websites that share the same browser process by bypassing mechanisms such as CORS.
This isolation mode is also pretty effective against things like side channel attacks, though real mitigations of those bugs require kernel/microcode updates.
To take over your phone, you need at least a sandbox escape exploit to break out of the browser app space, a privilege escalation exploit to get past selinux and other such protections, and even then the damage you can do is quite limited unless you’ve gained root access. Site isolation exploits can be used as the first step in a chain of exploits, but it’s not a very important part when it comes to preventing privileged RCE.
https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
That sounds like the exposed attack surface is a lot more than just whatever sites are running under your Firefox process.
But what do I know, I’m not a developer of security-hardened Android forks, so I just have to pick which randos on the internet I choose to believe. When the developers of DivestOS and GrapheneOS both have lengthy write-ups on why chromium base browsers are significantly more secure, I’m going to believe them because I don’t have the low level technical knowledge to refute what they’re saying.
If a third part web browser “bypasses or cripples” OS sandboxing, then any app can. Seems like Graphene’s hardening isn’t very good for third party apps in that case.
Firefox doesn’t use Android’s API for sandboxing processes from each other, but that sandboxing isn’t what’s protecting your phone from getting taken over. There are many layers of security present within Android and process isolation for web content is just one of them.
I’m sure Graphene’s fork of Chrome is more secure than Firefox (especially with JIT turned off) but that doesn’t mean running Firefox presents any risk.
Android’s design is such that I should be able to install a random app and see no adverse effects other than battery drain/high network load without clicking through dozens of security prompts. If that’s not the case, there’s a vulnerability in the Android layer that needs patching, such as the Qualcomm vulnerability that was released recently.
With open security holes like that, not even Chrome’s site isolation is going to protect you
Right, so if Gecko based browsers can cause that kind of security concern on Graphene, what does that mean for people using Android ROMs that are not hardened, or, OEM variants that do not receive regular security updates?
Any app installed by a user that takes advantage of an active and unpatched CVE, can do all sorts of actions to compromise an entire phone, or critical parts of it. Are you saying that’s not the case?
The difference between a compromised app, and a browser, is that even a “safe” Firefox install is used to browse a near infinite possibility of websites, any number of which might be running an active campaign targeting unpatched Android vulnerabilities.
It sounds like you’re saying that despite Firefox Geckos significantly larger attack surface, the fact that Chromium doesn’t eliminate all risk, means there’s no difference.
I still don’t really see what “that kind of security concern” is in this context. Same-site isolation protects two websites from each other, nothing more. The isolation API Chromium uses to drop permissions on some of its threads are used to limit the potential of a single exploit, but they don’t prevent things like the Qualcomm vulnerability from being abused.
It’s not like any website can just break a web browser, they need to exploit the browser in the first place.
For unpatched people, that means they’re in trouble. Luckily, Android is so fragmented that there is no exploit that’ll get root access on all devices. It’s hard to even get root access on the same model of phone. In practice, drive-by malware is actually quite rare for how many unpatched Android phone are out there.
There is probably more risk in using Firefox than there is in using Chromium, but the additional protections here are quite overstated in my opinion. You can’t get enough layers of defence when you’re a human rights activist or whatever (but then you’d use an iPhone in lockdown mode anyway), but just because Firefox doesn’t implement a particular API doesn’t mean your phone can be taken over by any website you visit. You need a complex chain of exploits directly targeting your phone’s hardware and software configuration to get anything more than a force closed browser tab.
As for the attack surface, Chromium implements a significantly larger API and provides a significantly larger attack surface, with permissions and code to do things like access USB drives and open serial ports. I’d say the huge chunk of Chromium-only browser features leave Chromium with a larger attack surface, not a smaller one.
I personally prefer the additional privacy improvements Firefox brings over the two layers of malware protection that patched versions of Chromium provide. I’m no Khashoggi and I don’t work on any nuclear plants, I’ll probably be Fine™️ and so will you.