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Chrome plugins pose a HUGE security problem. This one, for example, gets access to your GMail account. Do you want that? What else could this plugin do since it

Chrome plugins pose a HUGE security problem. This one, for example, gets access to your GMail account. Do you want that? What else could this plugin do since it can read your email? Do you trust the author not to steal your GMail cookie? Are you installing this at work? What kind of trade secrets could you potentially leak? And how does it affect your corporate compliance requirements? If your email is subject to HIPAA regulation, then you may be leaking protected health information. That's pretty bad. I, for one, rarely install plugins. I've written plugins for my own amusement that can do some very bad things, and it's just too easy. Think twice people.

thrownaway2424 12y ago
I really really really want a better security model for chrome extensions. As an example, I'd be happy to install this extension if it didn't "have access to" my gmail content, but was somehow able to add DOM matching and mutating callbacks that were run under Gmail. The matching part would be under my control and couldn't be updated by the extension. For example I'd be happy to let this extension mutate any img tag. I'm sure you can find a million holes in this idea, but it would be better than what we have today.
- alooPotato 12y ago
  Maybe if the permission was something like "Let this extension read and mutate stuff on the page but don't let it make any ajax requests". Would that be sufficient?
  - joshuacc 12y ago
    Not the person you were responding to, but this could be easily worked around by sticking `img` tags into the page with urls that are crafted to share information.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
joev_ 12y ago
It's still a much, much safer model than Firefox's Add-ons.
ramoq 12y ago
Perhaps if I threw this on github people could see the code themselves, or better yet; run the extension in dev mode so they can 100% be sure they know the code running. Appreciate the concerns claudiusd. Just trying to protect people's email privacy :)

thrownaway2424 12y ago

I really really really want a better security model for chrome extensions. As an example, I'd be happy to install this extension if it didn't "have access to" my gmail content, but was somehow able to add DOM matching and mutating callbacks that were run under Gmail. The matching part would be under my control and couldn't be updated by the extension. For example I'd be happy to let this extension mutate any img tag. I'm sure you can find a million holes in this idea, but it would be better than what we have today.

alooPotato 12y ago
Maybe if the permission was something like "Let this extension read and mutate stuff on the page but don't let it make any ajax requests". Would that be sufficient?
- joshuacc 12y ago
  Not the person you were responding to, but this could be easily worked around by sticking `img` tags into the page with urls that are crafted to share information.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

joev_ 12y ago

It's still a much, much safer model than Firefox's Add-ons.

ramoq 12y ago

Perhaps if I threw this on github people could see the code themselves, or better yet; run the extension in dev mode so they can 100% be sure they know the code running. Appreciate the concerns claudiusd. Just trying to protect people's email privacy :)