14
votes
Chrome uses ten to thirteen percent more RAM due to Google's 'Site Isolation' protection for Spectre CPU flaws
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- Authors
- Brad Chacos
- Published
- Jul 12 2018
- Word count
- 421 words
What’s the performance tradeoff for Firefox, if any?
I don't think Firefox has implemented this Site Isolation feature. This bugzilla issue appears to be tracking the feature, which Firefox calls "isolated origins": https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1391252
Presumably it would lead to significant bloat in Firefox as well.
Chromium I think began experimenting with this feature beginning of 2018: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/Home/chromium-security/ssca
(Mozilla dev here)
We're working on site isolation (dubbed "Project Fission") but it's going to be at least a year of work, potentially more.
We're doing a ton of work on reducing the memory footprint of content processes right now, in preparation for the eventuality of shipping Fission.
Didn't firefox mess with javascript timers to make this attack impossible?
We have made adjustments to
window.performance.now, yes.We don't consider that to have made Spectre attacks impossible, hence the continued work on site isolation.
Edit: I should point out that when we don't consider something to be impossible, it means that we haven't seen any working proof-of-concept, but we cannot prove that such a thing doesn't exist. Site isolation is very much a defense-in-depth initiative.
Compare amount of money ff has and the amount of money Google does
Haha, if you heard some of the numbers I've heard with respect to the size of the Chrome org at Google...
Put it this way: I heard that one department in the Chrome group has more devs than the entire Firefox org.
. . . and yet you somehow manage to compete, and many webdevs consider firefox when building a site. Long live open source!
<3
If you read their docs on this, Google had actually been working on this for a year or two before Spectre was discovered.
Spectre just provided the final push for them to deploy site isolation by default.
We, on the other hand, just achieved 100% deployment of multiprocess in Firefox 57 last December.
Edit: Now we need to do the rest. In addition to memory reduction efforts, a lot of work needs to go into being able to load
iframes into separate processes.That's interesting since it looks like that article was published the day after the embargo was dropped. They were certainly working on this before it became public.
Is Chrome making this optional? I definitely love security and agree that it should be on by default, but this seems like a very fringe attack and something (even as a web developer myself) am not worried about falling victim to this attack (taking into consideration addons like uBlock Origin, etc will block scripts that try to do this even before they reach you (but not everyone gets adblock)). the cost doesn't seem to outweigh the benefit for people that can protect themselves in a myriad of other ways.
Why? Isn't this already migrated on the side of OS?
Meltdown is mitigated by fixes in the kernel. Spectre is not.
Allright, thanks