About a year ago, Google rolled out Site Isolation to desktop Chrome browsers. It did this as a defense against CPU parallel-channel attacks like Spectre . This technique implements and renders sites in separate processes to prevent them from interfering with each other, thereby increasing the browser's defensive capabilities ( a sandbox environment ).
On Thursday, Chocolate Factory said it had enabled the security in the Android version of Chrome 77, which was released last month. The biz add-on also expanded Site Isolation capabilities.
Mobile devices must have at least 2GB of RAM to use Site Isolation. Even then, the defense only kicks in when you visit sites with a login mechanism, and only for 99% of Chrome for Android.
As software engineers Alex Moshchuk and Lukasz Anforowicz reported, when Chrome observes a password interaction on a site, future visits to it will be protected by Site Isolation.
For users who are not going to dedicate a small portion of memory for better security, there is the option to set a flag that will activate Site Isolation for all sites.
Desktop versions of Chrome have been strengthened. Site Isolation for Chrome on desktop can now be effectively defended, even if a hacker can exploit a memory bug .
And this can happen, as Google's Chrome browser process can identify the site associated with a given rendering process and can limit the available cookies, passwords, and site data, thus preventing data removal.
