Web browsers are increasingly more powerful with every update that is being released. To protect them from privacy concerns, browsers such are Chrome use sandboxing methods to provide a safe environment for utilizing the internet. The functionality of this system is closely linked to the capabilities of the operating system. The recently released upgrade for Windows 10 users presents a change in the line of code responsible for the sandboxes of the most used web browsers such as Chrome and Google Chrome.
The introduction of sandboxes aims to protect the personal data from your computer, limiting the access of the web browser to the documents in the memory of your computer. The access limitation is based on the OS’ facilities, which are limited to the Restricted Tokens introduced with Windows 2000.
Windows 10 Updates Affects Google Chrome
A security researcher working for Google’s Project Zero has discovered that a change in the Windows 10 update for the next month has caused a shift in the way that the Tokens are managed. James Forshaw performed a series of tests to prove how the Chromium sandbox can be damaged on Windows 10.
Most of the browsers that you might think of are currently affected by this change. Google Chrome, Brave, Opera, Microsoft Edge, as well as Mozilla Firefox are all using Chromium’s sandboxes to protect the privacy of their users, but the inner-workings for all of them will be affected.
Up until now, there has been no official declaration from Microsoft’s developing team. Fortunately, the new bug in Windows 10 is slightly difficult to explore without the presence of additional OS-level vulnerabilities. However, Google’s security researchers have not made any declaration regarding how could such a small change cause so many systems that were thought to be safe to collapse in the blink of an eye.
