Don’t mess with my browser!

In some ways, it's safer than ever to be online — especially if you use Chrome. With continued security research and seamless automatic updates, your browsing experience is always getting better and more secure. But recently you may have noticed something seems amiss. Online criminals have been increasing their use of malicious software that can silently hijack your browser settings. This has become a top issue in the Chrome help forums; we're listening and are here to help.

Bad guys trick you into installing and running this kind of software by bundling it with something you might want, like a free screensaver, a video plugin or—ironically—a supposed security update. These malicious programs disguise themselves so you won’t know they’re there and they may change your homepage or inject ads into the sites you browse. Worse, they block your ability to change your settings back and make themselves hard to uninstall, keeping you trapped in an undesired state.

We're taking steps to help, including adding a "reset browser settings" button in the last Chrome update, which lets you easily return your Chrome to a factory-fresh state. You can find this in the “Advanced Settings” section of Chrome settings.

 

In the current Canary build of Chrome, we’ll automatically block downloads of malware that we detect. If you see this message in the download tray at the bottom of your screen, you can click “Dismiss” knowing Chrome is working to keep you safe.

 

This is in addition to the 10,000 new websites we flag per day with Safe Browsing, which also detects and blocks malicious downloads, to keep more than 1 billion web users safe across multiple browsers that use this technology. Keeping you secure is a top priority, which is why we’re working on additional means to stop malicious software installs as well.

Update: 11/1/13: Updated to mention that Safe Browsing already detects and blocks malware.

Linus Upson, Vice President

reCAPTCHA just got easier (but only if you’re human)

Posted by Vinay Shet, Product Manager, reCAPTCHA

For over a decade, CAPTCHAs have used visual puzzles to help webmasters keep automated software from engaging in abusive activities on their sites. However, over the last few years advances in artificial intelligence have reduced the gap between human and machine capabilities in deciphering distorted text. Today, a successful CAPTCHA solution needs to go beyond just relying on text distortions to separate man from machine.

The reCAPTCHA team has been performing extensive research and making steady improvements to learn how to better protect users from attackers. As a result, reCAPTCHA is now more adaptive and better-equipped to distinguish legitimate users from automated software.

The updated system uses advanced risk analysis techniques, actively considering the user’s entire engagement with the CAPTCHA—before, during and after they interact with it. That means that today the distorted letters serve less as a test of humanity and more as a medium of engagement to elicit a broad range of cues that characterize humans and bots.

As part of this, we’ve recently released an update that creates different classes of CAPTCHAs for different kinds of users. This multi-faceted approach allows us to determine whether a potential user is actually a human or not, and serve our legitimate users CAPTCHAs that most of them will find easy to solve. Bots, on the other hand, will see CAPTCHAs that are considerably more difficult and designed to stop them from getting through.

A new and easier numeric CAPTCHA

Humans find numeric CAPTCHAs significantly easier to solve than those containing arbitrary text and achieve nearly perfect pass rates on them. So with our new system, you’ll encounter CAPTCHAs that are a breeze to solve. Bots, however, won’t even see them. While we’ve already made significant advancements to reCAPTCHA technology, we’ll have even more to report on in the next few months, so stay tuned.

Going beyond vulnerability rewards

Posted by Michal Zalewski, Google Security Team

We all benefit from the amazing volunteer work done by the open source community. That’s why we keep asking ourselves how to take the model pioneered with our Vulnerability Reward Program - and employ it to improve the security of key third-party software critical to the health of the entire Internet.

We thought about simply kicking off an OSS bug-hunting program, but this approach can easily backfire. In addition to valid reports, bug bounties invite a significant volume of spurious traffic - enough to completely overwhelm a small community of volunteers. On top of this, fixing a problem often requires more effort than finding it.

So we decided to try something new: provide financial incentives for down-to-earth, proactive improvements that go beyond merely fixing a known security bug. Whether you want to switch to a more secure allocator, to add privilege separation, to clean up a bunch of sketchy calls to strcat(), or even just to enable ASLR - we want to help!

We intend to roll out the program gradually, based on the quality of the received submissions and the feedback from the developer community. For the initial run, we decided to limit the scope to the following projects:

• Core infrastructure network services: OpenSSH, BIND, ISC DHCP
• Core infrastructure image parsers: libjpeg, libjpeg-turbo, libpng, giflib
• Open-source foundations of Google Chrome: Chromium, Blink
• Other high-impact libraries: OpenSSL, zlib
• Security-critical, commonly used components of the Linux kernel (including KVM)

We intend to soon extend the program to:

• Widely used web servers: Apache httpd, lighttpd, nginx
• Popular SMTP services: Sendmail, Postfix, Exim
• Toolchain security improvements for GCC, binutils, and llvm
• Virtual private networking: OpenVPN

How to participate?

Please submit your patches directly to the maintainers of the individual projects. Once your patch is accepted and merged into the repository, please send all the relevant details to security-patches@google.com. If we think that the submission has a demonstrable, positive impact on the security of the project, you will qualify for a reward ranging from $500 to $3,133.7.

Before participating, please read the official rules posted on this page; the document provides additional information about eligibility, rewards, and other important stuff.

Happy patching!