Chrome 20 on Linux and Flash sandboxing

[Very behind on blog posts so time to crank some out]

A week or so ago, Chrome 20 was released to the stable channel. There was little fanfare and even the official Chrome blog didn't have much to declare apart from bugfixes.

There were some things going on under the hood for the Linux platform, though. Security things, and some of them I implemented and am quite excited by.

The biggest item is an improvement to Flash security. Traditionally, Linux -- across all browsers -- hasn't had great Flash security, due to lack of sandboxing options. That just changed: so-called Pepper Flash shipped to the stable channel on Linux with Chrome 20 (other platforms to follow real soon). I went into a little detail about the technical sandbox measures in Pepper Flash for Linux in an older blog post.

As mentioned in the previous blog post, native 64-bit Flash also gives a useful security boost on 64-bit Linux platforms.

There's more. Perhaps you're running 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04? Courtesy of Kees Cook, this release sneaked in Will Drewry's seccomp filter patches, which I blogged about earlier this year in the context of vsftpd-3.0.0's usage of seccomp filter sandboxing.

So why have just one Flash sandbox if you can have two? A bit of double-bagging if you like. Assuming you're running 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04 and Chrome 20 or newer, you'll also have a seccomp filter policy slapped on Flash -- in additional to the chroot() and PID namespace. This may impede attackers trying to perform a local privilege escalation, who can no longer call crazy brand-new syscalls or use socket() to load crazy protocol modules, etc.

No sandbox or combination of sandboxes will ever be perfect, but "some" is better than "none". For people who want to run Flash, Chrome 20 on 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04 is one of the more locked-down ways to do it.