Chromium now has more attack surface and maintenance burden than before. It doesn't have improved privacy or security. It has weaker security due to this change. The defenders have more code to defend and more complexity to wrap their heads around. It had an opportunity cost too.
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let me get opportunity cost out of the way: exploit is found, mitigation known. Vendor doesn't fix it, says "waiting for the big solution". Good situation?
re: weaker security: could you elaborate on that? That sounds like the usual "attack surface is proportional to code" 1/2
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Chromium didn't prevent detecting Incognito mode, and it still doesn't do that. They didn't fix anything, and they haven't committed to changing this. There is no increase to privacy or security. There is more attack surface, and users are less informed about Incognito provides.
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how can you first state that it required abusers to rewrite their attacks (so, it was effective against the attack that was actively deployed), and then state it has no effect? That's a contradiction.
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That's a complete misrepresentation of what I've been saying. I never said that it has no effect. I said Chromium privacy and security is no better than before, and it now has additional complexity and maintenance burden. You don't seem to disagree, and need a strawman instead.
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hey, sorry if I came across like that.
It's just that I feel you're proposing better metrics, and I feel that metrically, that mitigation seems like the thing to do (one problem down, only a potential problem appears).
Could you explain your metric? How's not doing that better?
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I'm stating the obvious, which is that if a feature does not provide quantifiable privacy or security benefits it isn't actually a real privacy or security improvement. Breaking very specific legacy code is a much different thing than fundamentally improving privacy or security.
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hey, don't call it obvious if the village idiot (that's me!) doesn't understand it ;)
And I still don't see how "it breaks a class of malicious sites" isn't quantifiable. That's simply a false statement, if you ask me.
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It was trivial to detect Incognito mode, and it's at least as trivial to do it as it was before. The browser project has more attack surface and maintenance burden along with the opportunity cost from taking this approach rather than making real improvements with those resources.
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As software, Chromium is not more private or more secure. It's slightly more complex and harder to maintain. It's not better positioned than it was before to address this, if they deem it to be something worth properly addressing in a meaningful way.
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It doesn't break a class of malicious sites. That's a misrepresentation of it. The only thing that it accomplished is a one time adjustment by the adversaries. It only addressed one way this was being detected, and they had the time they needed to adjust. Code is still there.
Metric that breaking things for one evil agent for a limited amount of time is worse than letting that actor do what it's doing, including the cost of implementing that mitigation, please.
You're beating around the bush.
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Incognito is no harder to detect than before. There is no way to present the software as having improved privacy. The adversaries weren't prevented from doing it for any period of time. They weren't even inconvenienced in any substantial way but rather had to update a library.
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