13 ms·

Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

253 points by slowenough 7y ago

slowenough 7y ago
This represents over 1 year of work. Why am I open sourcing this? I don't see any other RBI / CBII vendor open sourcing their platform and in the security industry "closed source" can create issues. But what about business defensibility? I agree. Open sourcing removes the trade secret aspect that could make a defensible business. At the same time, a determined hacker would already have my source code. A hacked "free wifi" connection here, a bit of social engineering there, and my so-called "competitive advantage" could be easily removed. Access to GitHub, Gitlab, other accounts would prove no obstacle for someone motivated, and open sourcing is a way to remove the advantage any small group of parties has by keeping it secret. How do I self-host it? There's instructions on the repository page.
- jusob 7y ago
  Unable to connect to https://free.cloudbrowser.xyz/ https://free.cloudbrowser.xyz/
  - slowenough 7y ago
    Sorry, I need to restart it. I resized the instance, then forgot. Hold on a couple minutes while the queue of browsers rebuilds on restart. Thanks for letting me know :) Edit: It's getting kind of slammed, right now. I might need to resize it up again in a while. Edit2: Alright, I have to resize it, it needs more power. Hold on while it comes back up. Queue is rebuilding @23:13 ET. Edit3: Okay, back up @23:20 ET. Please enjoy!
- mirimir 7y ago
  That's an admirable move. Nobody sane relies on anything that's closed-source. Edit: OK, nobody prudent.
- krzkaczor 7y ago
  Are you familiar with https://mightyapp.com/ https://mightyapp.com/ it looks like there are people working on something very similar but closed source & VC backed. Thoughts?
  - slowenough 7y ago
    Yes! I requested an invite and reached out to Suhail on Twitter (I actually interviewed at Mixpanel ~ 18 months ago before I knew anything about MP or MA) about a technical question about MA that I got to thinking about from my experience building BG but didn't hear back from them. Mixpanel was a cool interview. I remember the question was about data structure for a rank system (it was a heap). The office in SF is beautiful, and the lunchtime catered food, was great. I guess I'd have more to say about MA if I knew more about it! I did not try it yet and I don't know how they make Chrome faster in the cloud and deliver a seamless broadcast of the screen to the user, but with enough smart people, I'm sure it's possible. As I said in a previous comment, I definitely think the future is mreo 'app virtualization' in the cloud, in some sense perhaps MA is starting at the beginning of that curve.
    - Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
      > I definitely think the future is mreo 'app virtualization' Why would you think that? Where do you see this trend? Their app looks incredibly stupid to me and it is hard to imagine any large number of people that would use it. Your project aims to provide security, which is an interesting goal, that I think security-conscious people would want to use. But to virtualize a browser... for performance? For browser apps (which are already "virtualized" desktop apps, of sorts), trading off enormous amounts of bandwidth, for what, cheap RAM sticks that are getting cheaper by the month and faster SSDs for quick swap? For what usage case? That one guy who happens to have a chromebook but needs to run 100 tabs actively? You could just run "unload tab" extension already... Or like just have a desktop that you VNC into... Which all of the people that need this have been doing for decades...
      - slowenough 7y ago
- FreeHugs 7y ago
  When you say over one year of work, do you mean one year of manpower (aka ~2000 hours) or that you started it about a year ago?
  - slowenough 7y ago
    Thanks for the thoughtful question. For the CE release, I deleted the Git history (it became too difficult to deal with branch rewrites trying to remove all the cruft and deployment secret keys etc). But the actual current working repo for the non-free version has ~ 2400 commits[0]. And the repo that I forked that from (~ 7 months ago), I'd closed 238 issues, and the repo I forked that project from I closed 200 issues. Those previous repos are all my work built from the ground up within this last ~12 months as well. The current working repo has closed 124 issues. My Gitlab contribs for the last year are at: https://gitlab.com/dosycorp https://gitlab.com/dosycorp And it's actually a little bit over 1 year, and if I count the Gitlab contribs show there, it's over 5500. So, yeah it's been about 2000 hours I think. Working full time every week day and most weekends, and often longer than regular hours (but also dividing the work up in the day into sprints because that's how I manage myself to work best). It's definitely been a year. [0]: https://imgur.com/gallery/wpNhxS0 https://imgur.com/gallery/wpNhxS0
    - FreeHugs 7y ago
      Awesome. Thanks for the detailed answer. I dig your dedication! You well earned to be on the front page! Who do you see as the main target audience? And do you have a business model in mind?
      - slowenough 7y ago
        Thank you for this! Main audience is people and organizations who are having problems with malware and cyber attacks. Business model I am still working on, but it's a mishmash of licensing (+ maintenance, for hybrid / on-prem) and pay per seat (for cloud-based). Could be other ways to provide value. What's your background? I'm open to new ideas.
- westi 7y ago
  This is pretty cool. It might be work stopping the browser 'loading' itself inception style with some kind of blacklisting of loadable urls - I assume you already have something to protect against SSRF type attacks on the platform itself.
  - slowenough 7y ago
    It sounds like it might be work to stop the browser loading itself inception style. I like it can load itself. What's the biggest problem you've had with that ability?
mrskitch 7y ago
Hey, this is super cool and interesting! Are you using puppeteer to do this? Might be cool to partner on some of it if you’re looking into that (I run browserless.io). Best!
- slowenough 7y ago
  Hey! Thanks for the message. I like browserless! I don't use puppeteer. I use Chrome DevTools Protocol heavily tho. I started using chrome-remote-interface but hit limits in what it can do with Targets (specifically, flat session mode) and the latest versions of the API. Now I just use the WebSocket directly. I'd like to partner. Email me cris@dosycorp.com
  - Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
    Will there be any architectural hurdle in integrating puppeteer with BrowserGap to provide a remote automated workflow?
    - slowenough 7y ago
      There's no reason this couldn't happen. pptr and BG both use Chrome DevTools to communicate with the browser, so there's that commonality. I haven't looked extensively at the pptr source but I imagine both pptr and BG do some bookkeeping of state related to the sequence of commands (BG certainly does), rather than a purely "stateless" command queue. For instance, for some things you need to keep track of which session is associated with which target. For other command sequences (such as Runtime.evaluate) you need to know which execution context to evaluate in. And you can keep track of open execution contexts by tracking various Runtime domain events (such as executionContextCreated, executionContextDestroyed, etc). So to provide a sophisticated level of interaction with the page, some amount of chattiness and state is required for the protocol on top of the DevTools wire protocol. What I'm getting at is, if there are hurdles, they will likely emerge from the different ways in which pptr and BG handle state and that chattiness to achieve particular user intents. Also, BG does not require pptr to do automation. It's possible to simply record and replay (again with a further layer of book-keeping that's too involved to get into here), the BG command sequence (which itself is a superset of the DevTools protocol). All the same, I've often thought about providing a functionality to "export to puppeteer" (or to nightmare, or to phantomjs, etc) in terms of getting a transcript in a widely used format that people can take and run anywhere. That's one thing that excites me about pptr X BG. In any case, automation is not something that is currently provided in the CE, but it's in the paid version at https://browsergap.xyz https://browsergap.xyz
gotts 7y ago
I must be missing something but can someone please explain how browsergap > self-host on your own machine (at home, or in a VPS, VPC or the public cloud) is more secure/private then just setting up a VPN on that machine?
- m1sta_ 7y ago
  It's a different approach. The most material difference is that a VPN does not protect you if a rouge web app breaks out of the browser sandbox.
  - slowenough 7y ago
    Thank you for helping explain things! :)
- angry_octet 7y ago
  As I understand it, it's like an extreme sandbox -- a completely separate computer (or a VM) where all the web stuff happens (javascript etc), which just ships pixels to your computer (phone/laptop etc). Ideally the complexity of the client software is low, i.e. not a web browser, and there is strict site isolation (VMs) at the sandbox side to prevent leakage from one site to another. I'm a little vague as to how this implementation works. So this is nothing to do with a VPN as such, but of course you could host it in the cloud, or run a VPN to a cloud endpoint.
  - slowenough 7y ago
    Yes, that's correct, thank you for helping explain things! :)
    - o-__-o 7y ago
      What I used to do was launch a browser in an Xvnc or RDP session in a VM somewhere. Then do all my browsing from there. Later, I worked somewhere where RDP was blocked so I started using Guacamole (RDP/VNC over websocket). What this author is providing is a similar and all-in-one npm solution for the above. Also has use-cases outside of secure runtime environments...
dlandis 7y ago
Could someone write a few sentences about what it is and how it works, and why it is significant? I see neither this post, the GH repo, nor its website really says much of anything on the subject. I only see info about why it’s being open sourced and how to set it up. If someone were to go to all that trouble, I am surprised they would stop short on just providing basic info.
- slowenough 7y ago
  Sure, BrowserGap is a remote browser isolation product. RBI means accessing the public internet through a browser that runs in the cloud, rather than through a browser that runs on your device. This helps protect you from attacks on the web.
  - slowenough 7y ago
    And, if you're interested, read on for more detail. It works by providing a thin client over the web that you connect your regular browser to. The thin client provides an interface to a remote browser that you interact with the browser the public internet. This is significant because the internet is a cesspool of attacks. Malware, ransomware, virii, tracking, exploited PDFs, ways to deliver device zero days over the web, browser zero days. All these things can lead to the security of your device and network being compromised, causing significant inconvenience, distress and loss for you. BrowserGap and the RBI methodology acknowledges that not all threats can be detected and neutralized (such as by virus scanners), in order to face that reality, RBI adopts a "isolation" posture towards threats, effectively isolating them in the remote machine and preventing them from reaching your device. With BrowserGap, in order to render the content of a web page, the only thing we send to your device form the remote page is pixels. So no HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc from your browsing is ever executed on your device. Cloud-based internet isolation is another name for this security practice and it is an emerging industry. Symantec recently acquired a company in this space, and Menlo Security was awarded[2] an agreement to build a CBII prototype for DISA, after a June 2018 request for RBI solutions that could eventually serve 60% of DoD's ~ 3 million users[0][1]. See more about RBI[1]. [0]: https://secureview.cloudbrowser.xyz/uploads/fileajqk.kkpgdih.pdf.html https://secureview.cloudbrowser.xyz/uploads/fileajqk.kkpgdih... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_isolation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_isolation [2]: https://www.menlosecurity.com/press-releases-blog/disa-cloud-based-internet-isolation-cbii-awarded-to-the-by-light-professional-it-services-llc-and-menlo-security-team https://www.menlosecurity.com/press-releases-blog/disa-cloud...
infinitone 7y ago
Just tried it acouple times and keep getting hit by google captcha... Maybe this is the Google AI team trying to get more people to solv'em? ;-)
- slowenough 7y ago
  Good point, let me temporarily switch the default search provider to DuckDuckGo. This will take a while to propagate to the browsers. A workaround in the meantime is to enter a URL in the box instead. Edit: Switched to DDG as default search provider for this. Back up at 21:24 PST. Edit @23:00 PST: I've opened an issue with Google Cloud Support (the system is hosted on GCP even tho it is cloud-agnostic) and I don't expect they will be able to provide a resolution because this is probably the CAPTCHA behaving correctly. BTW, it could be the AI team getting some more data, who knows? ;) Somehow tho I think whatever we do is simply a drop in a bucket for them.
pcr910303 7y ago
Hmm, I'm not sure if people in the western world can use it but in South Korea (with a 1Gbps network) this is basically unusable. It has too much latency, text doesn't get entered, scrolling doesn't work, etc... Is the experience from US similar? Or is this just b.c. of server latency?
- judge2020 7y ago
  If you're talking about the free/demo version, it's hosted in a US-East GCP instance and the author said elsewhere in the thread that it's under heavy load, i imagine a self-hosted instance would work well.
- slowenough 7y ago
  I'm really sorry you're having this trouble! If you want, I can test it. I'll open up an "East Asia" instance and we can see how if it's any better.
  - pcr910303 7y ago
    I would like to test it! It would be great to have an East Asia instance for this.
    - slowenough 7y ago
      Cool! I'm just setting it up now. Please hold on a little bit. Edit: Okay an instance in East Asia is up and running! https://hk.cloudbrowser.xyz https://hk.cloudbrowser.xyz
      - pcr910303 7y ago
        Okay, much better now. I’m writing this comment in the Cloud Browser on my iPhone! :-) It’s now ‘usable’, but definitely not a good environment. Scrolling is unbearable, and once you start scrolling it doesn’t stop, so it’s a pain to navigate.
        7y ago
0x073 7y ago
Is it more secure than Guacamole + libvirt + chromium os?
- slowenough 7y ago
  If you mean running the VM locally, then that has a risk of any exploits being able to escape the VM, and attack your machine directly. That seems less secure than facing the risk of any exploits being able to escape the hypervisor in the cloud, someohow come through the text protocol connection to your computer, and exploit you there. The extra layer of security provided by the remote cloud is important. If, on the other hand, you mean using Guacamole to connect to a desktop running headless in the cloud, I'd say that's a similar level of security to BrowserGap.
  - hathym 7y ago
    What about a vm inside another vm?
    - o-__-o 7y ago
      Yo dawg
    - stjohnswarts 7y ago
      I heard if you run VBox inside of QEMU inside of VMWare all running different flavors of linux then you good, dawg.
aloer 7y ago
How does the Screen sharing work. Is it pixels out with noVNC or similar?
- slowenough 7y ago
  It's just pixels out. It's very basic. It's just screenshots and compressed with WebP (if client supports), and adjacent frames are dropped if they are the same.
sdan 7y ago
Get ready to be hired by Mighty XD. Liked your product from your previous submission and liked this one as well. I think it can help some people where censorship is present, but not particularly for me.
- slowenough 7y ago
  Thank you for this!
cicadas 7y ago
BrowserGap recursion https://i.imgur.com/RRC5Eh6.png https://i.imgur.com/RRC5Eh6.png
- slowenough 7y ago
  Yes! I'm a fan of that :)
- ppf 7y ago
  The free version is kinda unstable, but this is as far as I got: https://imgur.com/QMQVDrk https://imgur.com/QMQVDrk https://imgur.com/E2ZZBaZ https://imgur.com/E2ZZBaZ
  - slowenough 7y ago
    Wow, that is far! It might have been the 10 minute time limit I put on the free version. It used to be 30 minutes but today there were hundreds of people and many people getting told it was already full, so I tried to let everyone have a go. But, haha, I'm really glad that little modal dialog bubbled up the layers! XD It's kind of crazy when you think about what's happening ~~ you're chaining 7 browsers in row, using each to automate the next. It's crazy! Haha! XD You really got me with this, it's so funny! Thanks for giving me a huge smile.
    - ppf 7y ago
      Also, what does the "saved" value refer to? It's quite easy to make it have strange (negative, or very large) values.
      - slowenough 7y ago
        Oh, sorry. It compares the amount of data you are receiving, versus the amount of data you would be receiving if you were browsing directly. Saved = (total resource weight of original browsing) - (screenshots + protocol)
AndrewThrowaway 7y ago
Bleak future flashed in front of my eyes - Google Chrome v100 - browser runs on google's cloud, you are just being streamed view to your Chrome Client™. So secure and you are so out of control.
- dijit 7y ago
  Which would definitely be in-line with what they're doing presently with Stadia.
  - slowenough 7y ago
    For better or worse, I think the economics of it mean this is what will happen in future. As it gets possible to build very large and powerful computers more cheaply, they'll still be expensive and only the biggest corps will deploy them. And the experience deliverable from virtualized apps in those clouds will be vastly better than anything that can be run on a device. Considering the impact and requirements of AI only makes this more likely. So after briefly becoming all about "edge computing" and "fat clients" in the recent past, I think the future is going to see a swing back toward massive centralization. This will also only be compounded by the next advances in wafer process and quantum, and the increases in bandwidth to allow richer experiences over 5G. Our pocket devices might be "supercomputers" but the real supercomputers are still going to be in the cloud and capable, I think, of running everything. TL;DR - the next big advance in computing tech will disproportionately allocate towards the cloud rather than the device, is my bet. And we'll all have "dumb" terminals streaming us VR/AR + AI experiences all the time. Disclaimer: that future is not why I made this, I still think it is some time off and it just seems obvious this will happen. Rather than becoming all about "more powerful devices, less powerful servers", I think the future will be the other way round. :)
  - AndrewThrowaway 7y ago
    To be fair running browser sessions should be so much less demanding than running triple A games.
    - 7y ago
cryptozeus 7y ago
On ios safari, browergap is unusable. Screen is totally pixelated after hitting the search button.
- slowenough 7y ago
  Thanks a lot for your time on this report, and I'm really sorry about that! It sounds like the screen is pixelated and unusable. That must be very annoying! I don't have an iPhone next to me right now, and I have not tested in Safari for about a week. Would you mind sharing a screenshot? I know that because iOS Safari does not support WebP, I'm just using JPEGs which means the quality is worse there. As a short term workaround, I'll now turn up the JPEG quality. This will take some time to propagate to browsers. Again, I'm very sorry you had this experience today! I will test on iOS and improve the usability. I've had other reports that scrolling is terrible in iOS. I'm just adding the iOS issues to the GitHub repo now. It could be great to contribute your screenshot to there! :) Edit: Also, I'm sorry but would you be able to tell me are you using https://free.cloudbrowser.xyz https://free.cloudbrowser.xyz or https://hk.cloudbrowser.xyz https://hk.cloudbrowser.xyz? Because I am testing serving HK with imports rolledup for speed (less requests), and wonder if this caused a further issue.
  - cryptozeus 7y ago
    Give me your email, i will send the screenshot of what I see. Any random emIl is fine.
    - slowenough 7y ago
      Thanks for offering to send a screenshot of what you see! Sorry I don't have a random email, but here you go: cris@dosyago.com
danbmil99 7y ago
Would this have problems with sites like LinkedIn that aggressively ban address blocks from cloud providers?
- slowenough 7y ago
  Thank you for this. First up, have you had any issues with site banning or CAPTCHA? After I saw your question I wanted to know so I just tried signing into my LinkedIn from https://hk.cloudbrowser.xyz https://hk.cloudbrowser.xyz and I'll share my experience. And first they sent a code to my email because "something seemed suspicious": https://imgur.com/gallery/2lflmjf https://imgur.com/gallery/2lflmjf When I put in the code from my email I could sign in and it worked as usual. I have noticed that everytime I land at https://bloomberg.com https://bloomberg.com I get a CAPTCHA (1 only) and then I could read the site. I opened a support ticket with BB but they said they don't need to do anything right now. I felt OK with that. 1 CAPTCHA is not too bad.
computator 7y ago
Someone else already mentioned being hit by Google captchas and the developer of this service said that he switched to DDG as the default search provider. Nevertheless I tried Google and kept working through 15 (yes, fifteen) captchas in a row and Google still wouldn't let me through, and then I gave up. What the hell? Surely even after 1 captcha, Google should be amply convinced that I'm not a robot and let me did a single search. Can anyone explain the purpose of Google putting up an apparently impossible barrier like that? Is it because my searches are comingled with dozens of other people attempting Google searches at the same time from the same IP address? Or Google decided to blacklist his IP address?
- drewmol 7y ago
  >Nevertheless I tried Google and kept working through 15 (yes, fifteen) captchas in a row and Google still wouldn't let me through, and then I gave up. What the hell? Surely even after 1 captcha, Google should be amply convinced that I'm not a robot and let me did a single search. Google probably identified you as computator prior to the capcha but that profile had no value for seemingly impossibly. >Can anyone explain the purpose of Google putting up an apparently impossible barrier like that? Your video will play automatically (after these fourteen short messages from our sponsors)
- slowenough 7y ago
  Thats really good feedback, thank you for your time on this. Also, that's terrible! I'm so sorry for you that you had that experience today. You must feel pretty angry to sit through 15 CAPTCHAs! I have to solve the CAPTCHA problem. I'm sorry I can't explain why this happens or how the CAPTCHA system works. I don't know anything about it. I'm OKAY with the occasional CAPTCHA, but I'm not satisfied that people are getting hit like this. I've been told that VPNs have a solution to this (since they need to deal with their clients getting faced with CAPTCHAs as well) but I'm sorry I have not reached out to any VPNs yet about this because, last time this problem occurred[0], after an hour or two I checked and it stopped happening, and there were no more CAPTCHAs. So last time I did not have to change the default search provider to DDG. I'll send an email to NordVPN now and ask them if they have any idea what I can do. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21375379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21375379
wila 7y ago
This is cool, but to me it sounds like you are building high value targets for a hacker. Hack one instance and get access to hundreds of users browsing the internet.
- slowenough 7y ago
  The risk you point out is extremely true. That's one reason why corporate/paid deployments are single-tenant. So everyone (not hundreds, it's more compartmentalized than that) on an instance belongs to the same company, or if desired, the same unit. Even in this free demo, every user has their own browser process, with its own uid owner, and that OS uid has its own limited permissions. At the same time, it's not an insignificant risk at all and you raise a very good point, which I'm surprised no one brought up before. Thank you for bringing it to everyone's attention. An instance is a single point of failure, it's also less attack surface. To some extent, that's a tradeoff. Relative to all devices and network infrastructure in a typical company that access the public web, there's less attack surface if all web access funnels through a BG instance. On the other hand, it's a concentration of the risks into one place. My belief is that makes it easier to manage, and that the "gap" between the client infrastructure and devices and the cloud (through which only pixels, and a wire protocol of user intent pass), makes it more secure than accessing the public web directly. Even tho it's a single point of attack, a compromise of a cloud machine, is not the same as a compromise of a device in a company intranet, or a mobile phone of someone in the company. In order to exploit the user's local machine or their organization's network, an attacker would still need to convert any instance access they had into access of a company device or network. This could happen through attack vectors in the pixels for the screen view (less likely) or through compromising the source code that serves the thin client (more likely). This is why monitoring of source code integrity is important. Open Source is an important part of that. At the same time, in these free demo versions the browsers only exist for 10 minutes, and, exactly as you say, hundreds of strangers are all browsing from the same machine together. TL;DR - It's a tradeoff of centralized infrastructure. There's less attack surface, but there's also a single point of failure. Also, if you want to responsibly dislcose any security vulnerabilities you discover, please report to cris@dosycorp.com and if you want I can acknowledge you here https://github.com/dosycorp/vulnerability-reports https://github.com/dosycorp/vulnerability-reports
jtvjan 7y ago
Does this support Flash Player? Having plugins like that RBI'd would be very useful as they're big attack vectors and usually not supported on mobile.
- slowenough 7y ago
  Not flash, but PDF and DOCX/XLSX should work okay. I have not thought about Flash, but I totally get the point you make. It looks like it would be very useful as they are big attack vectors and usually not supported on mobile. Thank you for this feedback.
ComodoHacker 7y ago
Cool idea at first, but on second thought, how is it supposed to mitigate internet threats? Users need to download files, open them with local apps, upload local files. All necessary channels for RCEs and exfiltration are still there. Current malware codebase might get stuck with it, but it's a matter of time and adoption. Other threats like clickjacking, cryptomining, phishing would just work as before. Am I missing something?
- slowenough 7y ago
  First up that is some great feedback and raises a lot of really good points. I don't know if you're missing anything but this feedback about files is on point. I really appreciate it. And I'm surprised no one raise this until now. Thank you for your time thinking about this and for making the space for me to speak about it. > Users need to download files, open them with local apps, upload local files. Ideally, user's don't download files, they use the Secure remote file viewer[0] (which currently handles PDFs, DOC/X, XLSX, etc), so that helps with exploits from there (such as the Chrome zero day from PDFium that recently occurred). No configuration is required, it automatically jumps in whenever a download starts. Also, because the browser is running in the cloud, that "download" actually only happens between the web and the cloud. The file literally goes down to a temporary directory on a server in the cloud, before being sent to the secure file viewer. That file never touches the client's device or network. And the secure file viewer only sends pixels to the client, because it converts all documents to images, and then, the browser sends a screenshot of that page. So it's like... two layers of images. Anyway, that helps mitigate the RCE threat from exploited file objects, browser and device zero days. And no HTML,JS,CSS from the browsed page is ever sent to your device. As for opening with local apps, that's debatable with things like G Suite and Office 365. But we can integrate with a corporation's SWG (secure web gateway) and file policy so BG doesn't degrade their existing security, but it does provide an extra layer. As for uploading that is absolutely required, otherwise many things would be unusable. I don't pretend that BG provides any sort of malware or virus scanner (mainly because there is not download), but as for uploads, it's possible to integrate into an organizations' existing SWG technology to gate-keep content that leaves, and also white and black list accessible sites. > Current malware codebase might get stuck with it, but it's a matter of time and adoption. I agree that to some extent, security is an ongoing "arms race". But there seems to be limits to what malware can achieve through the exploitation of pixels sent to the device. It puts a big limit on their attack vectors. It sounds like there's no point taking any steps, because malware can always find a way through. When you say something like this, I feel like I'm wasting my time talking security, because it looks like you'd never adopt a mitigation anyway. > Other threats like clickjacking, cryptomining, phishing would just work as before. That's a great point. I don't think this tool can prevent against social engineering threats like phishing, fraud and deception. It may even may them worse by allowing users to feel "more secure" and therefore act more rashly. No tool provides perfect protection, but BG can reduce the attack surface and isolate and contain many threats away from the device and network of the client. In the case of clickjacking, older browsers can be vulnerable because of CSP headers, but with BG you always proxy through the latest chrome. As for cryptomining that will simply not work well at all. We have monitoring software that puts hard limits on CPU, memory and bandwidth for each browser and each user. Please, go ahead and try it. [0]: https://imgur.com/gallery/Z32ZPg3 https://imgur.com/gallery/Z32ZPg3
throwaway58235 7y ago
Darn... I'm working on almost exactly the same project. The big challenge is getting access to server hardware that is actually meant for webbrowsing. Not only are AWS et al expensive, they primarily offer "webservers" which are optimized for very light not very CPU intensive workloads and needless to say they also don't offer hardware accelerated video decoding.
- slowenough 7y ago
  Hey! Sorry for taking so long to get back to you. I saw your comment and wanted to respond, and I have been very busy today because of this post. Thanks for sharing your feeling about this. It looks like you're working on almost exactly the same project, and that the big challenge is getting access to server hardware for webbrowsing, because not only are AWS etc expensive, they primarily offer "webservers" optimized for very light not very CPU intensive workloads, and needless to say they also don't offer hardware accelerated video decoding. Wow! Sounds like you're doing something interesting. Are you uninterested in collaboration? I was thinking of ways to make the video better, but right now I'm basically just using DIY "MJPEG" over websocket. As for the server hardware, I was decided to join the Stripe Atlas program at the start of 2017, and from that I was able to get 5K in AWS credits, and then more Google Cloud credits, and I also applied to IBM and Digital Ocean on my own and got credits from them as well. So, so far I have been able to develop and then demo this (like today) without significant monetary cost. I also have some tips for you, because resource usage was one of my concerns, but TBH I find Chrome headless actually always uses less CPU than I imagine. It's all about the page that it is rendering. The page determines everything, but Chrome itself is very light. So when I've budgeted for like 1 CPU per user, it's actually possible to get much more than that. And memory is the big thing that Chrome does lightly, it uses barely any RAM even with 100s of users on a machine. I was surprised by that. 100 users running Chrome and only ~ 20 Gb of RAM used. Also, regarding video, because I'm avoiding expensive video encoding (just sending screenshots) I avoid the CPU load of doing that. I've experimented with doing more processing of the frames, but it just throws the load way off. I chose to keep it simple and I'm pleased with that. At the same time, I want to explore ways to improve image quality.
  - 7y ago
ppf 7y ago
How is the user agent set? I'm trying out the free demo (free.cloudbrowser.xyz), and two different browsers (Chrome and Firefox) produce different and consistent user agents.
- slowenough 7y ago
  Both the user agent and navigator platform strings are mirrored from the client.
  - ppf 7y ago
    Could that cause any issues with browser-specific features? I'm not sure what browser/renderer you are actually using, but if I'm using something different, there could be a mismatch in advertised capabilities (through the user agent).
    - slowenough 7y ago
      Yes, but generally, web apps detect features not browser versions, because UAs are already an unreliable signal of features, from long before BG. Things like privacy extensions, screen readers, crawlers have various user agents. At the same time, you make a good point. I'll consider your reflection if I come to re-decide if this is a sensible default.
leowoo91 7y ago
Can someone explain me the major difference of this with being on a vpn along with a private tab? Thank you.
- slhck 7y ago
  Browser fingerprinting, for one, is something that can be avoided.
Crinus 7y ago
Does this run on raspberry pi? E.g. could i get a rpi4 (which seems powerful enough), connect it to my router and install this on it?
- slowenough 7y ago
  It should. If you do this, please post an issue or PR on the REPO. I'd love to include something cool like this in a "built with BG" section.
slowenough 7y ago
I just want to let everyone know there's also a version for Asia-pacific (in a HK Google datacenter) that will probably be faster if you're not in a US timezone. https://hk.cloudbrowser.xyz https://hk.cloudbrowser.xyz
jek_rock 7y ago
I have a few questions. Does it update the whole screen each time something is changed on the page? How have you got rid of Google captcha? I didn't get any while I was using it.
- slowenough 7y ago
  Yes, it listens for LayerTree.layerPainted events, and queues a screenshot on that. It also queues screenshots on other things, such as on "clicks", "scrolls" and a few other interactions. After Screenshots are queued, they're throttled to a low framerate, and then each frame is compared with the last sent, before it is sent to the client, and dropped if there's no change. I got rid of CAPTCHA by changing the search provider to DDG. Thank you for your comments, I really appreciate it! :)
wdrw 7y ago
A while ago I wrote something very similar - https://fasterbadger.com https://fasterbadger.com - see discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9679464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9679464 - based on PhantomJS - didn't put nearly as much work into it though, it's still very much in prototype stage - the goal was different though, not so much for privacy but for browsing JS- and CSS-heavy sites (e.g. most news sites) on legacy devices/phones, especially where bandwidth is at a premium.
- slowenough 7y ago
  That's very cool! Thank you so much for sharing this. I'm looking at your app and I love the long scroll feature. How did you do that? It's so cool how you can scroll down the page natively, and the image updates, that's really incredible. And I'm reading the initial discussion, and it's ... in 2015! Wow, how did you do this back then! I think thing's are so much easier now with all the features in the protocol. I am really interested in how you did this and I love the site. It's very cool and I prefer it to my own work in many ways. Would you be a terrible idea for you to contribute to BrowserGap? About half way through development, I was travelling and buying 4G data sims and I also thought I needed to use it for that (easily use 50Mb just on a news site). So I made a HTML only version (no images, just stripped back HTML, you can see the work in the various 'appminifier' subdirectories somewhere in the repo). It saved me data, but introduced lots of quirks. At some point I realized it was too difficult, and I was committed to another idea with it, rather than this low bandwidth, so I stopped working on that feature. Also, I love the Open in new tab? feature you have. This really rocks. It made me so happy to see this work! Thank you so much for sharing with me. :) I wanted to get a scrolling feature like you have and I couldn't think of a way to make it work. If yow could do that in BG I'd love it!
ausjke 7y ago
Just had a quick check, some web page will fail the click event(mouse click won't do anything). on the other hand I have been using novnc to do similar things for my own testing purposes(running chrome inside chrome remotely), it worked very well for me so far.
- slowenough 7y ago
  Thanks for the report, it's very valuable and thanks for pointing me to noVNC, it looks great! I'm very serious about usability issues, would it be impossible for you to provide some examples of sites where the click failed and what you clicked on? I try to get those things fixed ASAP because the experience of using is so important, I think it should be as familiar to a regular browser as possible.
rinchik 7y ago
Just tried the demo on your website and it seems to be quite slow and unresponsive. If this a load issue? Also it gives me a feeling that I'm not in control of what's happening on the screen. Could you please let me know how is this solution better (or more secure) than using remote desktop with disposable VMs?
- slowenough 7y ago
  I'm sorry about that! That's sounds like a really terrible experience you had trying this out today. It must feel really uncomfortable to not be in control of what's happening on screen. Edit: the HK site is back up. https://hk.cloudbrowser.xyz https://hk.cloudbrowser.xyz There's a couple of factors that could be playing into this. Primarily it's likely just the application itself. It is more slow, and less responsive than using a regular browser on your device. The frame-rate is capped very low, the image quality is lower, and there's more lag to each interaction since it involves (at the very least) a WebSocket round trip and a screenshot. Secondly, you could be affected by geography, which has a very significant effect. If you are close to the primary server (US East, Virginia) you'll have a faster more responsive experience. In a few minutes I'll have the HK server (Asia Pacific) back up ( I was just resizing it down, it was seeing significantly less use than the US server), and if you're closer to that you can try there. Also, the free demo has many caps (so as to control costs). I cap the outgoing bandwidth of each user to a very low 3Mbit/s, and I use multiple ways to cap CPU usage, including (in extreme cases) killing the process. All of this means that if the page you are using wants to eat a lot of CPU (happens sometimes) then the app will slow right down for you (to preserve resources for everyone else on the system). I can say confidently that it is not about the number of users. We had More 100s at peak before and a single browser still felt snappy. So if you're getting slow down I think it is (to summarise), either: - You are experiencing the app for the first time, it is different to using a normal browser, interactions are slower and more choppy (but page loads should be as fast or faster). - The page you are browsing is hitting the resource monitoring and being downregulated. - You are link-wise far from the server (which is often, but not always, related to geography). If you're interested to give it another try I'm at another time I'm happy to arrange that. Would you be unwilling to leave your email at this form, and I can let you know a quieter time? Also, if you just email me at cris@dosycorp.com and let me know your approximate location, I can set up a server near you and we can attempt to work out any leg issues still occurring.
Legogris 7y ago
Great work, and so great of you to open-source this - I really hope you keep it that way! Would be really cool to set this up and set the server up to do some proxy-hopping to make IP tracking more difficult as well, regardless of client device and when roaming.. While I'd be more leaning towards self-hosting, if you set this up as a subscription service, your users will also benefit from sharing the same pool of IPs (though I imagine you'd also face issues with getting flagged/blacklisted/CAPTCHAd a lot through abusers and bots, that will be significant work to polise if you go that route).
- slowenough 7y ago
  Thank you for this!
throwaway444912 7y ago
This makes little sense, it doesn't protect you from exploits, they just run on the cloud instead. If an attacker has a browser exploit, they can still.. - read all your email - log all your passwords - wait for you to login to online banking and transfer all the money. You also have to worry about the host being compromised, or the operator logging your activity, etc. If this is something you really want for some reason, why not just RDP/VNC/Chrome Remote Desktop back to your office/home network.
- arghwhat 7y ago
  > This makes little sense, it doesn't protect you from exploits, they just run on the cloud instead. I am in no way endorsing this product (or the category of products), but it is incorrect to say that it doesn't protect you from exploits. It protects against your machine being compromised, and while the browser VM can be compromised, it can theoretically be ephemeral, possibly even only having the lifetime of a single tab (some products in the space does this IIRC). It's all just a matter of what your threat model is. > If this is something you really want for some reason, why not just RDP/VNC/Chrome Remote Desktop back to your office/home network. You could make a minimal linux VM with only a web browser, keep good discipline and never do anything else on it, and RDP into it. However, these products commonly provide much smaller attack surface than such a setup, and combined with something like VM-based tab isolation, you wouldn't be anywhere near the security features of such a product.
- slowenough 7y ago
  Perfect prevention of breaches isn't possible, you must assume compromise. Therefore part of your strategy must be the isolation and containment of an attacker's ability to do damage. For concerns regarding what you say, it's true. The worst case is a browser zero day that escapes the browser, enables privilege escalation, and goes on to compromise the entire client instance and lurks in the server catching everything. That's definitely a possibility on the free demo. However, for real deployments there are several layers of mitigation. On the most drastic end, we run each browser and server pair inside its own docker container. In that case, the exploit must, first escape the browser -> escape the Docker container -> gain code execution -> gain privilege escalation -> compromise whole instance. I would never say it's "impossible" but I would say that we have brought effective defenses against that. Another layer of mitigation is that each browser is totally scrubbed each time it is used. This is a tradeoff as we lose all session cookies and cache data, but we can do this, if required. You can even scrub it yourself while using it (right click/top hold to get the context menu, and select "Wipe everything". A further layer of mitigation is we completely reprovision / scrub the entire server every hour / day / week. I think you are getting the idea. By separating the client's devices and network from DMZ where "web work" occurs, and containing the attacks within this "air gapped" satellite, we greatly limit the attacker's scope to cause harm, plus we greatly increase our ability to deliver mitigation at any scale and schedule we choose. Another advantage of this is, you don't need to download anything, RDP/VNC requires some extra app or setup, this is just connect to a web site and you're good to go. You can self host to manage trust. Organizations typically want to partner with a provider even if they do self-host or go hybrid, because they don't want to manage everything themselves.
vhodges 7y ago
Some what relevant https://ungleich.ch/u/blog/how-to-run-your-browser-in-the-cloud/ https://ungleich.ch/u/blog/how-to-run-your-browser-in-the-cl... (which will ultimately lead you to https://guacamole.apache.org/ https://guacamole.apache.org/)
z3t4 7y ago
So is this using the canvas? What about accessability?
- slowenough 7y ago
  That's a great point, and something I have not considered. It's a big oversight, I'm sorry about that. Let me think about it. There must be a way to do this.
  - z3t4 7y ago
    For screen readers you could run it server side. Then stream audio/video to the client. Although I dont think this is the best sution to the problem. A better solution would be to run the browser with a hardware abstraction layer, like a virtual machine.
    - slowenough 7y ago
      That's a clever idea about running screen readers server side, thanks!
Hitton 7y ago
Surprisingly usable, considering it's on the other side of the globe. Personally I don't see myself having a use for it, but I'm sure it could find its users. Two thing I noticed. You have to enter address including "http(s)" to avoid searching it in DDG. And more annoyingly I couldn't select text on web page.
- slowenough 7y ago
  Thanks for saying that! As for text selection, the best I have so far is right click to open context menu select "Copy text from here" And you should get a box pop up with text you can select. :)
kpsychwave 7y ago
Interested to hear about professional use cases for this kind of tool. I am working on a cloud-based sandbox browser very similar to the OP here: https://www.sandboxbrowser.com/ https://www.sandboxbrowser.com/ My target audience is software developers, QA engineers, and Ops people who want a predictable isolated browser environment for doing various forms of testing / hacking.
slowenough 7y ago
Hey HN, thanks for all the love on this, and for helping me think about other use cases for and how to communicate about this product. I really appreciate this! Also, I noticed I spent a lot of time maintaining the demo instances (resizing). In a real deployment the number of users per machine is pretty much static, but here I've had to deal with scaling and spikes. It occurred to me today that I could probably put the free demos behind a load balancer (smaller basic machines, and scale them up or down), so that I don't have to manually resize the instance. I've taken down the two demo sites (free & hk) for now, while I work on the load balancer setup. Should be back up in a couple hours.
- slowenough 7y ago
  Edit: Servers are back up I moved from a single massive instance to a target pool behind a load balancer with health checks based on if there's available queue. https://free.cloudbrowser.xyz https://free.cloudbrowser.xyz https://hk.cloudbrowser.xyz https://hk.cloudbrowser.xyz I have not worked out how to geographically load balance both of those from a single domain based on which you are closest too, but I want to see if these new smaller instances in load balanced target group pools can scale to take the load like a larger instance.
  - slowenough 7y ago
    The load balancing setup I used today has issues, which you can see if you're using it now (very slow). Namely, load balancing and scaling based on CPU is not a good metric, because new instances (which are still serving multiple users), will keep absorbing new users before the metric is triggered, and even when it is triggered, a new instance will take a while to spin up and build some browsers, so scaling lags too far behind load and the effect is existing instances get and stay overloaded. So, I have an idea for a new autoscaling system that puts 1 tiny machine per user, but it will take some reconfiguring. So, in the meantime, I'm switching back to the old system (massive instances, vertical scale). I'll do that now and the servers should switch to the new system in about 30 mins.
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253 points by slowenough 7y ago

This represents over 1 year of work. Why am I open sourcing this? I don't see any other RBI / CBII vendor open sourcing their platform and in the security industry "closed source" can create issues. But what about business defensibility? I agree. Open sourcing removes the trade secret aspect that could make a defensible business. At the same time, a determined hacker would already have my source code. A hacked "free wifi" connection here, a bit of social engineering there, and my so-called "competitive advantage" could be easily removed. Access to GitHub, Gitlab, other accounts would prove no obstacle for someone motivated, and open sourcing is a way to remove the advantage any small group of parties has by keeping it secret. How do I self-host it? There's instructions on the repository page.

jusob 7y ago
Unable to connect to https://free.cloudbrowser.xyz/ https://free.cloudbrowser.xyz/
- slowenough 7y ago
  Sorry, I need to restart it. I resized the instance, then forgot. Hold on a couple minutes while the queue of browsers rebuilds on restart. Thanks for letting me know :) Edit: It's getting kind of slammed, right now. I might need to resize it up again in a while. Edit2: Alright, I have to resize it, it needs more power. Hold on while it comes back up. Queue is rebuilding @23:13 ET. Edit3: Okay, back up @23:20 ET. Please enjoy!
mirimir 7y ago
That's an admirable move. Nobody sane relies on anything that's closed-source. Edit: OK, nobody prudent.
krzkaczor 7y ago
Are you familiar with https://mightyapp.com/ https://mightyapp.com/ it looks like there are people working on something very similar but closed source & VC backed. Thoughts?
- slowenough 7y ago
  Yes! I requested an invite and reached out to Suhail on Twitter (I actually interviewed at Mixpanel ~ 18 months ago before I knew anything about MP or MA) about a technical question about MA that I got to thinking about from my experience building BG but didn't hear back from them. Mixpanel was a cool interview. I remember the question was about data structure for a rank system (it was a heap). The office in SF is beautiful, and the lunchtime catered food, was great. I guess I'd have more to say about MA if I knew more about it! I did not try it yet and I don't know how they make Chrome faster in the cloud and deliver a seamless broadcast of the screen to the user, but with enough smart people, I'm sure it's possible. As I said in a previous comment, I definitely think the future is mreo 'app virtualization' in the cloud, in some sense perhaps MA is starting at the beginning of that curve.
  - Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
    > I definitely think the future is mreo 'app virtualization' Why would you think that? Where do you see this trend? Their app looks incredibly stupid to me and it is hard to imagine any large number of people that would use it. Your project aims to provide security, which is an interesting goal, that I think security-conscious people would want to use. But to virtualize a browser... for performance? For browser apps (which are already "virtualized" desktop apps, of sorts), trading off enormous amounts of bandwidth, for what, cheap RAM sticks that are getting cheaper by the month and faster SSDs for quick swap? For what usage case? That one guy who happens to have a chromebook but needs to run 100 tabs actively? You could just run "unload tab" extension already... Or like just have a desktop that you VNC into... Which all of the people that need this have been doing for decades...
    - slowenough 7y ago
FreeHugs 7y ago
When you say over one year of work, do you mean one year of manpower (aka ~2000 hours) or that you started it about a year ago?
- slowenough 7y ago
  Thanks for the thoughtful question. For the CE release, I deleted the Git history (it became too difficult to deal with branch rewrites trying to remove all the cruft and deployment secret keys etc). But the actual current working repo for the non-free version has ~ 2400 commits[0]. And the repo that I forked that from (~ 7 months ago), I'd closed 238 issues, and the repo I forked that project from I closed 200 issues. Those previous repos are all my work built from the ground up within this last ~12 months as well. The current working repo has closed 124 issues. My Gitlab contribs for the last year are at: https://gitlab.com/dosycorp https://gitlab.com/dosycorp And it's actually a little bit over 1 year, and if I count the Gitlab contribs show there, it's over 5500. So, yeah it's been about 2000 hours I think. Working full time every week day and most weekends, and often longer than regular hours (but also dividing the work up in the day into sprints because that's how I manage myself to work best). It's definitely been a year. [0]: https://imgur.com/gallery/wpNhxS0 https://imgur.com/gallery/wpNhxS0
  - FreeHugs 7y ago
    Awesome. Thanks for the detailed answer. I dig your dedication! You well earned to be on the front page! Who do you see as the main target audience? And do you have a business model in mind?
    - slowenough 7y ago
      Thank you for this! Main audience is people and organizations who are having problems with malware and cyber attacks. Business model I am still working on, but it's a mishmash of licensing (+ maintenance, for hybrid / on-prem) and pay per seat (for cloud-based). Could be other ways to provide value. What's your background? I'm open to new ideas.
westi 7y ago
This is pretty cool. It might be work stopping the browser 'loading' itself inception style with some kind of blacklisting of loadable urls - I assume you already have something to protect against SSRF type attacks on the platform itself.
- slowenough 7y ago
  It sounds like it might be work to stop the browser loading itself inception style. I like it can load itself. What's the biggest problem you've had with that ability?

mrskitch 7y ago

Hey, this is super cool and interesting! Are you using puppeteer to do this? Might be cool to partner on some of it if you’re looking into that (I run browserless.io). Best!

slowenough 7y ago
Hey! Thanks for the message. I like browserless! I don't use puppeteer. I use Chrome DevTools Protocol heavily tho. I started using chrome-remote-interface but hit limits in what it can do with Targets (specifically, flat session mode) and the latest versions of the API. Now I just use the WebSocket directly. I'd like to partner. Email me cris@dosycorp.com
- Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
  Will there be any architectural hurdle in integrating puppeteer with BrowserGap to provide a remote automated workflow?
  - slowenough 7y ago
    There's no reason this couldn't happen. pptr and BG both use Chrome DevTools to communicate with the browser, so there's that commonality. I haven't looked extensively at the pptr source but I imagine both pptr and BG do some bookkeeping of state related to the sequence of commands (BG certainly does), rather than a purely "stateless" command queue. For instance, for some things you need to keep track of which session is associated with which target. For other command sequences (such as Runtime.evaluate) you need to know which execution context to evaluate in. And you can keep track of open execution contexts by tracking various Runtime domain events (such as executionContextCreated, executionContextDestroyed, etc). So to provide a sophisticated level of interaction with the page, some amount of chattiness and state is required for the protocol on top of the DevTools wire protocol. What I'm getting at is, if there are hurdles, they will likely emerge from the different ways in which pptr and BG handle state and that chattiness to achieve particular user intents. Also, BG does not require pptr to do automation. It's possible to simply record and replay (again with a further layer of book-keeping that's too involved to get into here), the BG command sequence (which itself is a superset of the DevTools protocol). All the same, I've often thought about providing a functionality to "export to puppeteer" (or to nightmare, or to phantomjs, etc) in terms of getting a transcript in a widely used format that people can take and run anywhere. That's one thing that excites me about pptr X BG. In any case, automation is not something that is currently provided in the CE, but it's in the paid version at https://browsergap.xyz https://browsergap.xyz

gotts 7y ago

I must be missing something but can someone please explain how browsergap > self-host on your own machine (at home, or in a VPS, VPC or the public cloud) is more secure/private then just setting up a VPN on that machine?

m1sta_ 7y ago
It's a different approach. The most material difference is that a VPN does not protect you if a rouge web app breaks out of the browser sandbox.
- slowenough 7y ago
  Thank you for helping explain things! :)
angry_octet 7y ago
As I understand it, it's like an extreme sandbox -- a completely separate computer (or a VM) where all the web stuff happens (javascript etc), which just ships pixels to your computer (phone/laptop etc). Ideally the complexity of the client software is low, i.e. not a web browser, and there is strict site isolation (VMs) at the sandbox side to prevent leakage from one site to another. I'm a little vague as to how this implementation works. So this is nothing to do with a VPN as such, but of course you could host it in the cloud, or run a VPN to a cloud endpoint.
- slowenough 7y ago
  Yes, that's correct, thank you for helping explain things! :)
  - o-__-o 7y ago
    What I used to do was launch a browser in an Xvnc or RDP session in a VM somewhere. Then do all my browsing from there. Later, I worked somewhere where RDP was blocked so I started using Guacamole (RDP/VNC over websocket). What this author is providing is a similar and all-in-one npm solution for the above. Also has use-cases outside of secure runtime environments...

dlandis 7y ago

Could someone write a few sentences about what it is and how it works, and why it is significant? I see neither this post, the GH repo, nor its website really says much of anything on the subject. I only see info about why it’s being open sourced and how to set it up. If someone were to go to all that trouble, I am surprised they would stop short on just providing basic info.

slowenough 7y ago
Sure, BrowserGap is a remote browser isolation product. RBI means accessing the public internet through a browser that runs in the cloud, rather than through a browser that runs on your device. This helps protect you from attacks on the web.
- slowenough 7y ago
  And, if you're interested, read on for more detail. It works by providing a thin client over the web that you connect your regular browser to. The thin client provides an interface to a remote browser that you interact with the browser the public internet. This is significant because the internet is a cesspool of attacks. Malware, ransomware, virii, tracking, exploited PDFs, ways to deliver device zero days over the web, browser zero days. All these things can lead to the security of your device and network being compromised, causing significant inconvenience, distress and loss for you. BrowserGap and the RBI methodology acknowledges that not all threats can be detected and neutralized (such as by virus scanners), in order to face that reality, RBI adopts a "isolation" posture towards threats, effectively isolating them in the remote machine and preventing them from reaching your device. With BrowserGap, in order to render the content of a web page, the only thing we send to your device form the remote page is pixels. So no HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc from your browsing is ever executed on your device. Cloud-based internet isolation is another name for this security practice and it is an emerging industry. Symantec recently acquired a company in this space, and Menlo Security was awarded[2] an agreement to build a CBII prototype for DISA, after a June 2018 request for RBI solutions that could eventually serve 60% of DoD's ~ 3 million users[0][1]. See more about RBI[1]. [0]: https://secureview.cloudbrowser.xyz/uploads/fileajqk.kkpgdih.pdf.html https://secureview.cloudbrowser.xyz/uploads/fileajqk.kkpgdih... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_isolation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_isolation [2]: https://www.menlosecurity.com/press-releases-blog/disa-cloud-based-internet-isolation-cbii-awarded-to-the-by-light-professional-it-services-llc-and-menlo-security-team https://www.menlosecurity.com/press-releases-blog/disa-cloud...

infinitone 7y ago

Just tried it acouple times and keep getting hit by google captcha... Maybe this is the Google AI team trying to get more people to solv'em? ;-)

slowenough 7y ago
Good point, let me temporarily switch the default search provider to DuckDuckGo. This will take a while to propagate to the browsers. A workaround in the meantime is to enter a URL in the box instead. Edit: Switched to DDG as default search provider for this. Back up at 21:24 PST. Edit @23:00 PST: I've opened an issue with Google Cloud Support (the system is hosted on GCP even tho it is cloud-agnostic) and I don't expect they will be able to provide a resolution because this is probably the CAPTCHA behaving correctly. BTW, it could be the AI team getting some more data, who knows? ;) Somehow tho I think whatever we do is simply a drop in a bucket for them.

pcr910303 7y ago

Hmm, I'm not sure if people in the western world can use it but in South Korea (with a 1Gbps network) this is basically unusable. It has too much latency, text doesn't get entered, scrolling doesn't work, etc... Is the experience from US similar? Or is this just b.c. of server latency?

judge2020 7y ago
If you're talking about the free/demo version, it's hosted in a US-East GCP instance and the author said elsewhere in the thread that it's under heavy load, i imagine a self-hosted instance would work well.
slowenough 7y ago
I'm really sorry you're having this trouble! If you want, I can test it. I'll open up an "East Asia" instance and we can see how if it's any better.
- pcr910303 7y ago
  I would like to test it! It would be great to have an East Asia instance for this.
  - slowenough 7y ago
    Cool! I'm just setting it up now. Please hold on a little bit. Edit: Okay an instance in East Asia is up and running! https://hk.cloudbrowser.xyz https://hk.cloudbrowser.xyz
    - pcr910303 7y ago
      Okay, much better now. I’m writing this comment in the Cloud Browser on my iPhone! :-) It’s now ‘usable’, but definitely not a good environment. Scrolling is unbearable, and once you start scrolling it doesn’t stop, so it’s a pain to navigate.
      - 7y ago

0x073 7y ago

Is it more secure than Guacamole + libvirt + chromium os?

slowenough 7y ago
If you mean running the VM locally, then that has a risk of any exploits being able to escape the VM, and attack your machine directly. That seems less secure than facing the risk of any exploits being able to escape the hypervisor in the cloud, someohow come through the text protocol connection to your computer, and exploit you there. The extra layer of security provided by the remote cloud is important. If, on the other hand, you mean using Guacamole to connect to a desktop running headless in the cloud, I'd say that's a similar level of security to BrowserGap.
- hathym 7y ago
  What about a vm inside another vm?
  - o-__-o 7y ago
    Yo dawg
  - stjohnswarts 7y ago
    I heard if you run VBox inside of QEMU inside of VMWare all running different flavors of linux then you good, dawg.

aloer 7y ago

How does the Screen sharing work. Is it pixels out with noVNC or similar?

slowenough 7y ago
It's just pixels out. It's very basic. It's just screenshots and compressed with WebP (if client supports), and adjacent frames are dropped if they are the same.

sdan 7y ago

Get ready to be hired by Mighty XD. Liked your product from your previous submission and liked this one as well. I think it can help some people where censorship is present, but not particularly for me.

slowenough 7y ago
Thank you for this!

cicadas 7y ago

BrowserGap recursion https://i.imgur.com/RRC5Eh6.png https://i.imgur.com/RRC5Eh6.png

slowenough 7y ago
Yes! I'm a fan of that :)
ppf 7y ago
The free version is kinda unstable, but this is as far as I got: https://imgur.com/QMQVDrk https://imgur.com/QMQVDrk https://imgur.com/E2ZZBaZ https://imgur.com/E2ZZBaZ
- slowenough 7y ago
  Wow, that is far! It might have been the 10 minute time limit I put on the free version. It used to be 30 minutes but today there were hundreds of people and many people getting told it was already full, so I tried to let everyone have a go. But, haha, I'm really glad that little modal dialog bubbled up the layers! XD It's kind of crazy when you think about what's happening ~~ you're chaining 7 browsers in row, using each to automate the next. It's crazy! Haha! XD You really got me with this, it's so funny! Thanks for giving me a huge smile.
  - ppf 7y ago
    Also, what does the "saved" value refer to? It's quite easy to make it have strange (negative, or very large) values.
    - slowenough 7y ago
      Oh, sorry. It compares the amount of data you are receiving, versus the amount of data you would be receiving if you were browsing directly. Saved = (total resource weight of original browsing) - (screenshots + protocol)

AndrewThrowaway 7y ago

Bleak future flashed in front of my eyes - Google Chrome v100 - browser runs on google's cloud, you are just being streamed view to your Chrome Client™. So secure and you are so out of control.

dijit 7y ago
Which would definitely be in-line with what they're doing presently with Stadia.
- slowenough 7y ago
  For better or worse, I think the economics of it mean this is what will happen in future. As it gets possible to build very large and powerful computers more cheaply, they'll still be expensive and only the biggest corps will deploy them. And the experience deliverable from virtualized apps in those clouds will be vastly better than anything that can be run on a device. Considering the impact and requirements of AI only makes this more likely. So after briefly becoming all about "edge computing" and "fat clients" in the recent past, I think the future is going to see a swing back toward massive centralization. This will also only be compounded by the next advances in wafer process and quantum, and the increases in bandwidth to allow richer experiences over 5G. Our pocket devices might be "supercomputers" but the real supercomputers are still going to be in the cloud and capable, I think, of running everything. TL;DR - the next big advance in computing tech will disproportionately allocate towards the cloud rather than the device, is my bet. And we'll all have "dumb" terminals streaming us VR/AR + AI experiences all the time. Disclaimer: that future is not why I made this, I still think it is some time off and it just seems obvious this will happen. Rather than becoming all about "more powerful devices, less powerful servers", I think the future will be the other way round. :)
- AndrewThrowaway 7y ago
  To be fair running browser sessions should be so much less demanding than running triple A games.
  - 7y ago

cryptozeus 7y ago

On ios safari, browergap is unusable. Screen is totally pixelated after hitting the search button.

slowenough 7y ago
Thanks a lot for your time on this report, and I'm really sorry about that! It sounds like the screen is pixelated and unusable. That must be very annoying! I don't have an iPhone next to me right now, and I have not tested in Safari for about a week. Would you mind sharing a screenshot? I know that because iOS Safari does not support WebP, I'm just using JPEGs which means the quality is worse there. As a short term workaround, I'll now turn up the JPEG quality. This will take some time to propagate to browsers. Again, I'm very sorry you had this experience today! I will test on iOS and improve the usability. I've had other reports that scrolling is terrible in iOS. I'm just adding the iOS issues to the GitHub repo now. It could be great to contribute your screenshot to there! :) Edit: Also, I'm sorry but would you be able to tell me are you using https://free.cloudbrowser.xyz https://free.cloudbrowser.xyz or https://hk.cloudbrowser.xyz https://hk.cloudbrowser.xyz? Because I am testing serving HK with imports rolledup for speed (less requests), and wonder if this caused a further issue.
- cryptozeus 7y ago
  Give me your email, i will send the screenshot of what I see. Any random emIl is fine.
  - slowenough 7y ago
    Thanks for offering to send a screenshot of what you see! Sorry I don't have a random email, but here you go: cris@dosyago.com

danbmil99 7y ago

Would this have problems with sites like LinkedIn that aggressively ban address blocks from cloud providers?

slowenough 7y ago
Thank you for this. First up, have you had any issues with site banning or CAPTCHA? After I saw your question I wanted to know so I just tried signing into my LinkedIn from https://hk.cloudbrowser.xyz https://hk.cloudbrowser.xyz and I'll share my experience. And first they sent a code to my email because "something seemed suspicious": https://imgur.com/gallery/2lflmjf https://imgur.com/gallery/2lflmjf When I put in the code from my email I could sign in and it worked as usual. I have noticed that everytime I land at https://bloomberg.com https://bloomberg.com I get a CAPTCHA (1 only) and then I could read the site. I opened a support ticket with BB but they said they don't need to do anything right now. I felt OK with that. 1 CAPTCHA is not too bad.

computator 7y ago

Someone else already mentioned being hit by Google captchas and the developer of this service said that he switched to DDG as the default search provider. Nevertheless I tried Google and kept working through 15 (yes, fifteen) captchas in a row and Google still wouldn't let me through, and then I gave up. What the hell? Surely even after 1 captcha, Google should be amply convinced that I'm not a robot and let me did a single search. Can anyone explain the purpose of Google putting up an apparently impossible barrier like that? Is it because my searches are comingled with dozens of other people attempting Google searches at the same time from the same IP address? Or Google decided to blacklist his IP address?

drewmol 7y ago
>Nevertheless I tried Google and kept working through 15 (yes, fifteen) captchas in a row and Google still wouldn't let me through, and then I gave up. What the hell? Surely even after 1 captcha, Google should be amply convinced that I'm not a robot and let me did a single search. Google probably identified you as computator prior to the capcha but that profile had no value for seemingly impossibly. >Can anyone explain the purpose of Google putting up an apparently impossible barrier like that? Your video will play automatically (after these fourteen short messages from our sponsors)
slowenough 7y ago
Thats really good feedback, thank you for your time on this. Also, that's terrible! I'm so sorry for you that you had that experience today. You must feel pretty angry to sit through 15 CAPTCHAs! I have to solve the CAPTCHA problem. I'm sorry I can't explain why this happens or how the CAPTCHA system works. I don't know anything about it. I'm OKAY with the occasional CAPTCHA, but I'm not satisfied that people are getting hit like this. I've been told that VPNs have a solution to this (since they need to deal with their clients getting faced with CAPTCHAs as well) but I'm sorry I have not reached out to any VPNs yet about this because, last time this problem occurred[0], after an hour or two I checked and it stopped happening, and there were no more CAPTCHAs. So last time I did not have to change the default search provider to DDG. I'll send an email to NordVPN now and ask them if they have any idea what I can do. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21375379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21375379

wila 7y ago

This is cool, but to me it sounds like you are building high value targets for a hacker. Hack one instance and get access to hundreds of users browsing the internet.

slowenough 7y ago
The risk you point out is extremely true. That's one reason why corporate/paid deployments are single-tenant. So everyone (not hundreds, it's more compartmentalized than that) on an instance belongs to the same company, or if desired, the same unit. Even in this free demo, every user has their own browser process, with its own uid owner, and that OS uid has its own limited permissions. At the same time, it's not an insignificant risk at all and you raise a very good point, which I'm surprised no one brought up before. Thank you for bringing it to everyone's attention. An instance is a single point of failure, it's also less attack surface. To some extent, that's a tradeoff. Relative to all devices and network infrastructure in a typical company that access the public web, there's less attack surface if all web access funnels through a BG instance. On the other hand, it's a concentration of the risks into one place. My belief is that makes it easier to manage, and that the "gap" between the client infrastructure and devices and the cloud (through which only pixels, and a wire protocol of user intent pass), makes it more secure than accessing the public web directly. Even tho it's a single point of attack, a compromise of a cloud machine, is not the same as a compromise of a device in a company intranet, or a mobile phone of someone in the company. In order to exploit the user's local machine or their organization's network, an attacker would still need to convert any instance access they had into access of a company device or network. This could happen through attack vectors in the pixels for the screen view (less likely) or through compromising the source code that serves the thin client (more likely). This is why monitoring of source code integrity is important. Open Source is an important part of that. At the same time, in these free demo versions the browsers only exist for 10 minutes, and, exactly as you say, hundreds of strangers are all browsing from the same machine together. TL;DR - It's a tradeoff of centralized infrastructure. There's less attack surface, but there's also a single point of failure. Also, if you want to responsibly dislcose any security vulnerabilities you discover, please report to cris@dosycorp.com and if you want I can acknowledge you here https://github.com/dosycorp/vulnerability-reports https://github.com/dosycorp/vulnerability-reports

jtvjan 7y ago

Does this support Flash Player? Having plugins like that RBI'd would be very useful as they're big attack vectors and usually not supported on mobile.

slowenough 7y ago
Not flash, but PDF and DOCX/XLSX should work okay. I have not thought about Flash, but I totally get the point you make. It looks like it would be very useful as they are big attack vectors and usually not supported on mobile. Thank you for this feedback.

ComodoHacker 7y ago

Cool idea at first, but on second thought, how is it supposed to mitigate internet threats? Users need to download files, open them with local apps, upload local files. All necessary channels for RCEs and exfiltration are still there. Current malware codebase might get stuck with it, but it's a matter of time and adoption. Other threats like clickjacking, cryptomining, phishing would just work as before. Am I missing something?

slowenough 7y ago
First up that is some great feedback and raises a lot of really good points. I don't know if you're missing anything but this feedback about files is on point. I really appreciate it. And I'm surprised no one raise this until now. Thank you for your time thinking about this and for making the space for me to speak about it. > Users need to download files, open them with local apps, upload local files. Ideally, user's don't download files, they use the Secure remote file viewer[0] (which currently handles PDFs, DOC/X, XLSX, etc), so that helps with exploits from there (such as the Chrome zero day from PDFium that recently occurred). No configuration is required, it automatically jumps in whenever a download starts. Also, because the browser is running in the cloud, that "download" actually only happens between the web and the cloud. The file literally goes down to a temporary directory on a server in the cloud, before being sent to the secure file viewer. That file never touches the client's device or network. And the secure file viewer only sends pixels to the client, because it converts all documents to images, and then, the browser sends a screenshot of that page. So it's like... two layers of images. Anyway, that helps mitigate the RCE threat from exploited file objects, browser and device zero days. And no HTML,JS,CSS from the browsed page is ever sent to your device. As for opening with local apps, that's debatable with things like G Suite and Office 365. But we can integrate with a corporation's SWG (secure web gateway) and file policy so BG doesn't degrade their existing security, but it does provide an extra layer. As for uploading that is absolutely required, otherwise many things would be unusable. I don't pretend that BG provides any sort of malware or virus scanner (mainly because there is not download), but as for uploads, it's possible to integrate into an organizations' existing SWG technology to gate-keep content that leaves, and also white and black list accessible sites. > Current malware codebase might get stuck with it, but it's a matter of time and adoption. I agree that to some extent, security is an ongoing "arms race". But there seems to be limits to what malware can achieve through the exploitation of pixels sent to the device. It puts a big limit on their attack vectors. It sounds like there's no point taking any steps, because malware can always find a way through. When you say something like this, I feel like I'm wasting my time talking security, because it looks like you'd never adopt a mitigation anyway. > Other threats like clickjacking, cryptomining, phishing would just work as before. That's a great point. I don't think this tool can prevent against social engineering threats like phishing, fraud and deception. It may even may them worse by allowing users to feel "more secure" and therefore act more rashly. No tool provides perfect protection, but BG can reduce the attack surface and isolate and contain many threats away from the device and network of the client. In the case of clickjacking, older browsers can be vulnerable because of CSP headers, but with BG you always proxy through the latest chrome. As for cryptomining that will simply not work well at all. We have monitoring software that puts hard limits on CPU, memory and bandwidth for each browser and each user. Please, go ahead and try it. [0]: https://imgur.com/gallery/Z32ZPg3 https://imgur.com/gallery/Z32ZPg3

throwaway58235 7y ago

Darn... I'm working on almost exactly the same project. The big challenge is getting access to server hardware that is actually meant for webbrowsing. Not only are AWS et al expensive, they primarily offer "webservers" which are optimized for very light not very CPU intensive workloads and needless to say they also don't offer hardware accelerated video decoding.

slowenough 7y ago
Hey! Sorry for taking so long to get back to you. I saw your comment and wanted to respond, and I have been very busy today because of this post. Thanks for sharing your feeling about this. It looks like you're working on almost exactly the same project, and that the big challenge is getting access to server hardware for webbrowsing, because not only are AWS etc expensive, they primarily offer "webservers" optimized for very light not very CPU intensive workloads, and needless to say they also don't offer hardware accelerated video decoding. Wow! Sounds like you're doing something interesting. Are you uninterested in collaboration? I was thinking of ways to make the video better, but right now I'm basically just using DIY "MJPEG" over websocket. As for the server hardware, I was decided to join the Stripe Atlas program at the start of 2017, and from that I was able to get 5K in AWS credits, and then more Google Cloud credits, and I also applied to IBM and Digital Ocean on my own and got credits from them as well. So, so far I have been able to develop and then demo this (like today) without significant monetary cost. I also have some tips for you, because resource usage was one of my concerns, but TBH I find Chrome headless actually always uses less CPU than I imagine. It's all about the page that it is rendering. The page determines everything, but Chrome itself is very light. So when I've budgeted for like 1 CPU per user, it's actually possible to get much more than that. And memory is the big thing that Chrome does lightly, it uses barely any RAM even with 100s of users on a machine. I was surprised by that. 100 users running Chrome and only ~ 20 Gb of RAM used. Also, regarding video, because I'm avoiding expensive video encoding (just sending screenshots) I avoid the CPU load of doing that. I've experimented with doing more processing of the frames, but it just throws the load way off. I chose to keep it simple and I'm pleased with that. At the same time, I want to explore ways to improve image quality.
- 7y ago

ppf 7y ago

How is the user agent set? I'm trying out the free demo (free.cloudbrowser.xyz), and two different browsers (Chrome and Firefox) produce different and consistent user agents.

slowenough 7y ago
Both the user agent and navigator platform strings are mirrored from the client.
- ppf 7y ago
  Could that cause any issues with browser-specific features? I'm not sure what browser/renderer you are actually using, but if I'm using something different, there could be a mismatch in advertised capabilities (through the user agent).
  - slowenough 7y ago
    Yes, but generally, web apps detect features not browser versions, because UAs are already an unreliable signal of features, from long before BG. Things like privacy extensions, screen readers, crawlers have various user agents. At the same time, you make a good point. I'll consider your reflection if I come to re-decide if this is a sensible default.

leowoo91 7y ago

Can someone explain me the major difference of this with being on a vpn along with a private tab? Thank you.

slhck 7y ago
Browser fingerprinting, for one, is something that can be avoided.

Crinus 7y ago

Does this run on raspberry pi? E.g. could i get a rpi4 (which seems powerful enough), connect it to my router and install this on it?

slowenough 7y ago
It should. If you do this, please post an issue or PR on the REPO. I'd love to include something cool like this in a "built with BG" section.

slowenough 7y ago

I just want to let everyone know there's also a version for Asia-pacific (in a HK Google datacenter) that will probably be faster if you're not in a US timezone. https://hk.cloudbrowser.xyz https://hk.cloudbrowser.xyz

jek_rock 7y ago

I have a few questions. Does it update the whole screen each time something is changed on the page? How have you got rid of Google captcha? I didn't get any while I was using it.

slowenough 7y ago
Yes, it listens for LayerTree.layerPainted events, and queues a screenshot on that. It also queues screenshots on other things, such as on "clicks", "scrolls" and a few other interactions. After Screenshots are queued, they're throttled to a low framerate, and then each frame is compared with the last sent, before it is sent to the client, and dropped if there's no change. I got rid of CAPTCHA by changing the search provider to DDG. Thank you for your comments, I really appreciate it! :)

wdrw 7y ago

A while ago I wrote something very similar - https://fasterbadger.com https://fasterbadger.com - see discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9679464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9679464 - based on PhantomJS - didn't put nearly as much work into it though, it's still very much in prototype stage - the goal was different though, not so much for privacy but for browsing JS- and CSS-heavy sites (e.g. most news sites) on legacy devices/phones, especially where bandwidth is at a premium.

slowenough 7y ago
That's very cool! Thank you so much for sharing this. I'm looking at your app and I love the long scroll feature. How did you do that? It's so cool how you can scroll down the page natively, and the image updates, that's really incredible. And I'm reading the initial discussion, and it's ... in 2015! Wow, how did you do this back then! I think thing's are so much easier now with all the features in the protocol. I am really interested in how you did this and I love the site. It's very cool and I prefer it to my own work in many ways. Would you be a terrible idea for you to contribute to BrowserGap? About half way through development, I was travelling and buying 4G data sims and I also thought I needed to use it for that (easily use 50Mb just on a news site). So I made a HTML only version (no images, just stripped back HTML, you can see the work in the various 'appminifier' subdirectories somewhere in the repo). It saved me data, but introduced lots of quirks. At some point I realized it was too difficult, and I was committed to another idea with it, rather than this low bandwidth, so I stopped working on that feature. Also, I love the Open in new tab? feature you have. This really rocks. It made me so happy to see this work! Thank you so much for sharing with me. :) I wanted to get a scrolling feature like you have and I couldn't think of a way to make it work. If yow could do that in BG I'd love it!

ausjke 7y ago

Just had a quick check, some web page will fail the click event(mouse click won't do anything). on the other hand I have been using novnc to do similar things for my own testing purposes(running chrome inside chrome remotely), it worked very well for me so far.

slowenough 7y ago
Thanks for the report, it's very valuable and thanks for pointing me to noVNC, it looks great! I'm very serious about usability issues, would it be impossible for you to provide some examples of sites where the click failed and what you clicked on? I try to get those things fixed ASAP because the experience of using is so important, I think it should be as familiar to a regular browser as possible.

rinchik 7y ago

Just tried the demo on your website and it seems to be quite slow and unresponsive. If this a load issue? Also it gives me a feeling that I'm not in control of what's happening on the screen. Could you please let me know how is this solution better (or more secure) than using remote desktop with disposable VMs?

slowenough 7y ago
I'm sorry about that! That's sounds like a really terrible experience you had trying this out today. It must feel really uncomfortable to not be in control of what's happening on screen. Edit: the HK site is back up. https://hk.cloudbrowser.xyz https://hk.cloudbrowser.xyz There's a couple of factors that could be playing into this. Primarily it's likely just the application itself. It is more slow, and less responsive than using a regular browser on your device. The frame-rate is capped very low, the image quality is lower, and there's more lag to each interaction since it involves (at the very least) a WebSocket round trip and a screenshot. Secondly, you could be affected by geography, which has a very significant effect. If you are close to the primary server (US East, Virginia) you'll have a faster more responsive experience. In a few minutes I'll have the HK server (Asia Pacific) back up ( I was just resizing it down, it was seeing significantly less use than the US server), and if you're closer to that you can try there. Also, the free demo has many caps (so as to control costs). I cap the outgoing bandwidth of each user to a very low 3Mbit/s, and I use multiple ways to cap CPU usage, including (in extreme cases) killing the process. All of this means that if the page you are using wants to eat a lot of CPU (happens sometimes) then the app will slow right down for you (to preserve resources for everyone else on the system). I can say confidently that it is not about the number of users. We had More 100s at peak before and a single browser still felt snappy. So if you're getting slow down I think it is (to summarise), either: - You are experiencing the app for the first time, it is different to using a normal browser, interactions are slower and more choppy (but page loads should be as fast or faster). - The page you are browsing is hitting the resource monitoring and being downregulated. - You are link-wise far from the server (which is often, but not always, related to geography). If you're interested to give it another try I'm at another time I'm happy to arrange that. Would you be unwilling to leave your email at this form, and I can let you know a quieter time? Also, if you just email me at cris@dosycorp.com and let me know your approximate location, I can set up a server near you and we can attempt to work out any leg issues still occurring.

Legogris 7y ago

Great work, and so great of you to open-source this - I really hope you keep it that way! Would be really cool to set this up and set the server up to do some proxy-hopping to make IP tracking more difficult as well, regardless of client device and when roaming.. While I'd be more leaning towards self-hosting, if you set this up as a subscription service, your users will also benefit from sharing the same pool of IPs (though I imagine you'd also face issues with getting flagged/blacklisted/CAPTCHAd a lot through abusers and bots, that will be significant work to polise if you go that route).

slowenough 7y ago
Thank you for this!

throwaway444912 7y ago

This makes little sense, it doesn't protect you from exploits, they just run on the cloud instead. If an attacker has a browser exploit, they can still.. - read all your email - log all your passwords - wait for you to login to online banking and transfer all the money. You also have to worry about the host being compromised, or the operator logging your activity, etc. If this is something you really want for some reason, why not just RDP/VNC/Chrome Remote Desktop back to your office/home network.

arghwhat 7y ago
> This makes little sense, it doesn't protect you from exploits, they just run on the cloud instead. I am in no way endorsing this product (or the category of products), but it is incorrect to say that it doesn't protect you from exploits. It protects against your machine being compromised, and while the browser VM can be compromised, it can theoretically be ephemeral, possibly even only having the lifetime of a single tab (some products in the space does this IIRC). It's all just a matter of what your threat model is. > If this is something you really want for some reason, why not just RDP/VNC/Chrome Remote Desktop back to your office/home network. You could make a minimal linux VM with only a web browser, keep good discipline and never do anything else on it, and RDP into it. However, these products commonly provide much smaller attack surface than such a setup, and combined with something like VM-based tab isolation, you wouldn't be anywhere near the security features of such a product.
slowenough 7y ago
Perfect prevention of breaches isn't possible, you must assume compromise. Therefore part of your strategy must be the isolation and containment of an attacker's ability to do damage. For concerns regarding what you say, it's true. The worst case is a browser zero day that escapes the browser, enables privilege escalation, and goes on to compromise the entire client instance and lurks in the server catching everything. That's definitely a possibility on the free demo. However, for real deployments there are several layers of mitigation. On the most drastic end, we run each browser and server pair inside its own docker container. In that case, the exploit must, first escape the browser -> escape the Docker container -> gain code execution -> gain privilege escalation -> compromise whole instance. I would never say it's "impossible" but I would say that we have brought effective defenses against that. Another layer of mitigation is that each browser is totally scrubbed each time it is used. This is a tradeoff as we lose all session cookies and cache data, but we can do this, if required. You can even scrub it yourself while using it (right click/top hold to get the context menu, and select "Wipe everything". A further layer of mitigation is we completely reprovision / scrub the entire server every hour / day / week. I think you are getting the idea. By separating the client's devices and network from DMZ where "web work" occurs, and containing the attacks within this "air gapped" satellite, we greatly limit the attacker's scope to cause harm, plus we greatly increase our ability to deliver mitigation at any scale and schedule we choose. Another advantage of this is, you don't need to download anything, RDP/VNC requires some extra app or setup, this is just connect to a web site and you're good to go. You can self host to manage trust. Organizations typically want to partner with a provider even if they do self-host or go hybrid, because they don't want to manage everything themselves.

vhodges 7y ago

Some what relevant https://ungleich.ch/u/blog/how-to-run-your-browser-in-the-cloud/ https://ungleich.ch/u/blog/how-to-run-your-browser-in-the-cl... (which will ultimately lead you to https://guacamole.apache.org/ https://guacamole.apache.org/)

z3t4 7y ago

So is this using the canvas? What about accessability?

slowenough 7y ago
That's a great point, and something I have not considered. It's a big oversight, I'm sorry about that. Let me think about it. There must be a way to do this.
- z3t4 7y ago
  For screen readers you could run it server side. Then stream audio/video to the client. Although I dont think this is the best sution to the problem. A better solution would be to run the browser with a hardware abstraction layer, like a virtual machine.
  - slowenough 7y ago
    That's a clever idea about running screen readers server side, thanks!

Hitton 7y ago

Surprisingly usable, considering it's on the other side of the globe. Personally I don't see myself having a use for it, but I'm sure it could find its users. Two thing I noticed. You have to enter address including "http(s)" to avoid searching it in DDG. And more annoyingly I couldn't select text on web page.

slowenough 7y ago
Thanks for saying that! As for text selection, the best I have so far is right click to open context menu select "Copy text from here" And you should get a box pop up with text you can select. :)

kpsychwave 7y ago

Interested to hear about professional use cases for this kind of tool. I am working on a cloud-based sandbox browser very similar to the OP here: https://www.sandboxbrowser.com/ https://www.sandboxbrowser.com/ My target audience is software developers, QA engineers, and Ops people who want a predictable isolated browser environment for doing various forms of testing / hacking.

slowenough 7y ago

Hey HN, thanks for all the love on this, and for helping me think about other use cases for and how to communicate about this product. I really appreciate this! Also, I noticed I spent a lot of time maintaining the demo instances (resizing). In a real deployment the number of users per machine is pretty much static, but here I've had to deal with scaling and spikes. It occurred to me today that I could probably put the free demos behind a load balancer (smaller basic machines, and scale them up or down), so that I don't have to manually resize the instance. I've taken down the two demo sites (free & hk) for now, while I work on the load balancer setup. Should be back up in a couple hours.

slowenough 7y ago
Edit: Servers are back up I moved from a single massive instance to a target pool behind a load balancer with health checks based on if there's available queue. https://free.cloudbrowser.xyz https://free.cloudbrowser.xyz https://hk.cloudbrowser.xyz https://hk.cloudbrowser.xyz I have not worked out how to geographically load balance both of those from a single domain based on which you are closest too, but I want to see if these new smaller instances in load balanced target group pools can scale to take the load like a larger instance.
- slowenough 7y ago
  The load balancing setup I used today has issues, which you can see if you're using it now (very slow). Namely, load balancing and scaling based on CPU is not a good metric, because new instances (which are still serving multiple users), will keep absorbing new users before the metric is triggered, and even when it is triggered, a new instance will take a while to spin up and build some browsers, so scaling lags too far behind load and the effect is existing instances get and stay overloaded. So, I have an idea for a new autoscaling system that puts 1 tiny machine per user, but it will take some reconfiguring. So, in the meantime, I'm switching back to the old system (massive instances, vertical scale). I'll do that now and the servers should switch to the new system in about 30 mins.

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