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One approach to this would be to just ban extensions that are caught installing themselves without the user's permission. If the banned list is kept up to date

• aboodman 14y ago
  What do you ban? How do you establish identity for an extension? Remember that the bad guy can just change his ID each time he installs. Soon you are shipping blacklists with hundreds of thousands of entries to every client (or sending the ID of each install to the server to ask permission). Also, where do you store the blacklist? Remember that the bad guy can just modify it to remove his entry. Or he can modify Chrome itself to not check the blacklist. There are a long series of escalations you may propose here (encrypt the profile, try to detect changes, store the profile on the server, add a developer key system, etc). I'm just going to summarize and say there is no perfect solution to this problem. You can make bad behavior somewhat harder, but you cannot eliminate it without true application isolation. At each escalation you increase the complexity of the product, make genuine features harder to introduce, add bugs, and make the experience for legitimate developers worse. It's a challenging environment to write software in. That said, the team has some pretty clever ideas in development for future releases. We fight on.