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And this is why I don't use Chrome, nor recommend it to anyone. The dimwit Chrome developers continue their dumb insistence that penetrable security shouldn't

And this is why I don't use Chrome, nor recommend it to anyone. The dimwit Chrome developers continue their dumb insistence that penetrable security shouldn't exist. "Bathroom doors shouldn't have locks; someone could just kick the door in and then where would you be!" "Houses shouldn't have locks; you've got glass windows, don't you?! It's a false sense of security!" "Prisons shouldn't have 20-foot walls; Home Depot has 21 foot ladders, don't they?! Lex Luthor escaped via helicopter! It's a false sense of security!" "Bicycles shouldn't have locks; there are bolt cutters with five-foot handles, aren't there?! It's a false sense of security!" Of course in the real world, where Chrome developers do not live, we use locks in all these cases. There's a combination of social signalling (this is mine; do not disturb it) as well as legal signalling (locked means an affirmative action must be taken to break the security, which is punishable; unlocked is not punishable) as well as a substantial amount of actual security (the reality is not everyone carries five-foot bolt cutters, even if some people do). Maybe I can put it another way: Android, up through 4.2, only contemplated a single user per tablet. So if you gave your kids (or anyone) the tablet to play with, they had FULL and unrestricted access to your Gmail account, Google Play account, and so on. Someone, eventually, slapped some sense into the Android developers and now Android 4.3 has restricted profiles where you can let the kids play games without giving them access to your Google accounts. That someone needs to get their slapping gloves and wander over to the Chrome development team...

skymt 13y ago
I think it comes down to how the Chrome team is used to thinking about security. Most of Chrome's security work, such as the phishing blacklist and the process sandbox, aims to prevent attacks from malicious web pages. In those circumstances, "pretty good" security gets you nowhere. If there's a difficult but known way to break the sandbox and execute arbitrary code, it needs to be patched. Otherwise, the hole's obscurity won't prevent people from distributing exploit kits. A subtly broken sandbox is almost exactly as secure as no sandbox at all. If you're accustomed to thinking of security in this all-or-nothing way, the Chrome team's argument makes sense. And the state of the Internet encourages this kind of thinking. In the real world there are plenty of gray areas to security, but online there's always a sufficiently advanced and determined attacker.
TeMPOraL 13y ago
> "Bathroom doors shouldn't have locks; someone could just kick the door in and then where would you be!" Nitpick: Bathroom doors should have easy breakable locks (if any at all) because of danger of carbon monoxide poisoning; locked doors may be the only thing that stand between you and dragging out unconscious family member from danger. I for one was always taught as a kid to not lock the bathroom when taking a bath.
- chmars 13y ago
  There's a danger of carbon monoxide poisoning in the bathroom???
  - jacquesm 13y ago
    If you have a gas fired bath water heater in there, yes. Not as common today as they once were but there are still plenty of them.
    - greedo 13y ago
      In the US? Perhaps in other countries, but in the US, I've never seen a water heater in a bathroom.
      - OvidNaso 13y ago
        Absolutely. Certainly not common, but I've seen a few in the desert.
      - richardjordan 13y ago
        right - I live in the US nowadays and nobody has them - but back in the UK they're all over the place - stay at someone's house and there's a good chance they have one
        manarth 13y ago
        I've never heard of such a thing, let alone actually seen one in a bathroom. I've lived in the UK for all (bar a couple of years) of my life. [edit] I found an academic paper that discusses the safety of these heaters - dated 1973. I'd guess that they've gradually disappeared thanks to better heating systems and improved safety regulations. The paper: http://hej.sagepub.com/content/32/4/120.abstract http://hej.sagepub.com/content/32/4/120.abstract
rlwolfcastle 13y ago
Your comment is all over the shop. I don't understand the big deal here. You shouldn't be storing your passwords at all in a browser. http://raidersec.blogspot.com.au/2013/06/how-browsers-store-your-passwords-and.html http://raidersec.blogspot.com.au/2013/06/how-browsers-store-...
gsnedders 13y ago
FWIW, Hixie, whom timbl is responding to, isn't on the Chrome team, though works at Google.
unnuun 13y ago
It seems to me that the differential between those who know what a bookmarklet is and those who know that you can see everything in the settings menu is very small. So you're not talking about a huge effect here.
guelo 13y ago
I guess someone needs to start slapping iOS developers.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
sitharus 13y ago
If you run Chrome on OS X and have the keychain set to prompt you on every access you'll notice that Chrome does something really shocking. It reads and decrypts every password you have on startup. Safari and Firefox don't try to get the password until there's a form to put it in, but that's not good enough for Chrome. I only use Chrome for testing apps, never for real use.
- cbr 13y ago
  Not knowing why they did this, my guess is it's faster. When you go to site-that-requires-a-login.com Chrome can have the password box populated immediately instead of needing to ask Keychain for it.
  - X4 13y ago
    Don't make people believe this bs, just have a look at how many people have problems with exactly THIS "feature": http://www.google.com/search?q=kwallet+chrome+opens http://www.google.com/search?q=kwallet+chrome+opens including myself.
thezilch 13y ago
The reality is, you mistake a browser with a house, when the OS is the house. Let's rail on every OS distribution that defaults to unencrypted drives! And every digital device that has not bio-metric and multi-factor authentication! Grind your axe elsewhere; it's sad.
- to3m 13y ago
  It's not THAT unusual, on entering a house through a locked door, to find your way blocked by another door that needs unlocking. (One or both of these doors might even have two locks.) And then inside this locked house there will quite probably be rooms with locks on their own doors. And inside some of those rooms, cupboards, with doors, with locks on 'em! And look inside enough of these lockable cupboards, and you might well find a safe. With a door with a lock on it...
  - thezilch 13y ago
    So, I guess you don't carry the keys to your rooms and cupboards. Every time you want entry, you use a safe with significant entropy for OTP to the cupboard or room you want access, and the access is revoked 1 min after idle. Every time and everywhere. Ludicrous.
ZeroGravitas 13y ago
For android, you could and still can get kid launcher sandboxes that prevent people accessing other apps.
kamkha 13y ago
> "Houses shouldn't have locks; you've got glass windows, don't you?! It's a false sense of security!" Chrome's threat model [1] paints a different analogy. In their view—which I do think is reasonable—the OS is the house and Chrome is simply a room in the house. You don't put locks on all of the interior doors of your house to keep out burglars who might've bypassed your front door, do you? Their threat model makes sense for many users, and it's flawed for many others. One valid criticism that I do support of Chrome's model of handling passwords is the obscurity of it all. Users as a whole should certainly have a much better idea of how their passwords are being handled. [1] http://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/security-faq#TOC-Why-aren-t-physically-local-attacks-in-Chrome-s-threat-model- http://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/security-faq#...
- Terretta 13y ago
  > the OS is the house and Chrome is simply a room in the house. You don't put locks on all of the interior doors of your house to keep out burglars who might've bypassed your front door, do you? Most single family homes do, in fact, have locks on interior doors. And they're built that way, as that's what most people want.
ams6110 13y ago
this is why I don't use Chrome Or you could just disable password saving. This is one of the first things I do when I get a new browser or computer. I don't want the browser remembering my passwords.
johansch 13y ago
What if you could install an extension that disabled the "show stored password" feature? Would that make a huge difference to you? (Since that is about the same friction as running a soon to be extremely well known piece of javascript, or accessing a site to copy-paste it from.)

skymt 13y ago

I think it comes down to how the Chrome team is used to thinking about security. Most of Chrome's security work, such as the phishing blacklist and the process sandbox, aims to prevent attacks from malicious web pages. In those circumstances, "pretty good" security gets you nowhere. If there's a difficult but known way to break the sandbox and execute arbitrary code, it needs to be patched. Otherwise, the hole's obscurity won't prevent people from distributing exploit kits. A subtly broken sandbox is almost exactly as secure as no sandbox at all. If you're accustomed to thinking of security in this all-or-nothing way, the Chrome team's argument makes sense. And the state of the Internet encourages this kind of thinking. In the real world there are plenty of gray areas to security, but online there's always a sufficiently advanced and determined attacker.

TeMPOraL 13y ago

> "Bathroom doors shouldn't have locks; someone could just kick the door in and then where would you be!" Nitpick: Bathroom doors should have easy breakable locks (if any at all) because of danger of carbon monoxide poisoning; locked doors may be the only thing that stand between you and dragging out unconscious family member from danger. I for one was always taught as a kid to not lock the bathroom when taking a bath.

chmars 13y ago
There's a danger of carbon monoxide poisoning in the bathroom???
- jacquesm 13y ago
  If you have a gas fired bath water heater in there, yes. Not as common today as they once were but there are still plenty of them.
  - greedo 13y ago
    In the US? Perhaps in other countries, but in the US, I've never seen a water heater in a bathroom.
    - OvidNaso 13y ago
      Absolutely. Certainly not common, but I've seen a few in the desert.
    - richardjordan 13y ago
      right - I live in the US nowadays and nobody has them - but back in the UK they're all over the place - stay at someone's house and there's a good chance they have one
      - manarth 13y ago
        I've never heard of such a thing, let alone actually seen one in a bathroom. I've lived in the UK for all (bar a couple of years) of my life. [edit] I found an academic paper that discusses the safety of these heaters - dated 1973. I'd guess that they've gradually disappeared thanks to better heating systems and improved safety regulations. The paper: http://hej.sagepub.com/content/32/4/120.abstract http://hej.sagepub.com/content/32/4/120.abstract

rlwolfcastle 13y ago

Your comment is all over the shop. I don't understand the big deal here. You shouldn't be storing your passwords at all in a browser. http://raidersec.blogspot.com.au/2013/06/how-browsers-store-your-passwords-and.html http://raidersec.blogspot.com.au/2013/06/how-browsers-store-...

gsnedders 13y ago

FWIW, Hixie, whom timbl is responding to, isn't on the Chrome team, though works at Google.

unnuun 13y ago

It seems to me that the differential between those who know what a bookmarklet is and those who know that you can see everything in the settings menu is very small. So you're not talking about a huge effect here.

guelo 13y ago

I guess someone needs to start slapping iOS developers.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

sitharus 13y ago

If you run Chrome on OS X and have the keychain set to prompt you on every access you'll notice that Chrome does something really shocking. It reads and decrypts every password you have on startup. Safari and Firefox don't try to get the password until there's a form to put it in, but that's not good enough for Chrome. I only use Chrome for testing apps, never for real use.

cbr 13y ago
Not knowing why they did this, my guess is it's faster. When you go to site-that-requires-a-login.com Chrome can have the password box populated immediately instead of needing to ask Keychain for it.
- X4 13y ago
  Don't make people believe this bs, just have a look at how many people have problems with exactly THIS "feature": http://www.google.com/search?q=kwallet+chrome+opens http://www.google.com/search?q=kwallet+chrome+opens including myself.

thezilch 13y ago

The reality is, you mistake a browser with a house, when the OS is the house. Let's rail on every OS distribution that defaults to unencrypted drives! And every digital device that has not bio-metric and multi-factor authentication! Grind your axe elsewhere; it's sad.

to3m 13y ago
It's not THAT unusual, on entering a house through a locked door, to find your way blocked by another door that needs unlocking. (One or both of these doors might even have two locks.) And then inside this locked house there will quite probably be rooms with locks on their own doors. And inside some of those rooms, cupboards, with doors, with locks on 'em! And look inside enough of these lockable cupboards, and you might well find a safe. With a door with a lock on it...
- thezilch 13y ago
  So, I guess you don't carry the keys to your rooms and cupboards. Every time you want entry, you use a safe with significant entropy for OTP to the cupboard or room you want access, and the access is revoked 1 min after idle. Every time and everywhere. Ludicrous.

ZeroGravitas 13y ago

For android, you could and still can get kid launcher sandboxes that prevent people accessing other apps.

kamkha 13y ago

> "Houses shouldn't have locks; you've got glass windows, don't you?! It's a false sense of security!" Chrome's threat model [1] paints a different analogy. In their view—which I do think is reasonable—the OS is the house and Chrome is simply a room in the house. You don't put locks on all of the interior doors of your house to keep out burglars who might've bypassed your front door, do you? Their threat model makes sense for many users, and it's flawed for many others. One valid criticism that I do support of Chrome's model of handling passwords is the obscurity of it all. Users as a whole should certainly have a much better idea of how their passwords are being handled. [1] http://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/security-faq#TOC-Why-aren-t-physically-local-attacks-in-Chrome-s-threat-model- http://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/security-faq#...

Terretta 13y ago
> the OS is the house and Chrome is simply a room in the house. You don't put locks on all of the interior doors of your house to keep out burglars who might've bypassed your front door, do you? Most single family homes do, in fact, have locks on interior doors. And they're built that way, as that's what most people want.

ams6110 13y ago

this is why I don't use Chrome Or you could just disable password saving. This is one of the first things I do when I get a new browser or computer. I don't want the browser remembering my passwords.

johansch 13y ago

What if you could install an extension that disabled the "show stored password" feature? Would that make a huge difference to you? (Since that is about the same friction as running a soon to be extremely well known piece of javascript, or accessing a site to copy-paste it from.)