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Browsers are far more battle-tested than just about any other web-facing application on your computer. Of course, you could make the personal decision to trust
by xvector 7y ago
Browsers are far more battle-tested than just about any other web-facing application on your computer.
Of course, you could make the personal decision to trust a client, and that is fine. But if you aren’t willing to blindly trust a client, the other guy’s point still stands - browsers are probably just the better choice here from a security POV.
- slyall 7y agoBut a bittorrent client isn't trying to be a browser and all the complex stuff that requires. All it's doing is downloading bittorrent files and having a usable GUI. And as the original article demonstrated the first half of that is a weekend project.
- pdkl95 7y ago> Browsers are far more battle-tested than just about any other web-facing application on your computer. They also have a monstrous attack surface because they are "web-facing". A specialized client that only implements one protocol without any connection to the "web" is far easier to reason about and debug. If you only consider the number of man-years an application has been battle-tested, you imply that design complexity and attack surface doesn't matter. If we account for complexity by using a metric like "(man-years of battle-testing)/(magnitude of attack surface)", a well-tested specialized client that hasn't had many recent bug reports is a much safer choice than anything running in a browser. > blindly trust a client That's even worse for the browser: you have to trust several orders of magnitude more code implementing a massive set of interdependent features. Yes, there are probably a lot more people working on fixing bugs in the browser, but there are also a lot of people adding/modifying features and thus creating new bugs.