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Comment by RyanZAG | Hacker News Reader

Did a bit of digging - it lets NACL apps downloaded from those whitelisted Google apis have access to "dev interfaces". Brief search shows that these dev interfaces would have the ability to access the user's PC outside of the Chrome sandbox.

In effect, this gives Google remote code execution rights from their domains on anybody running Chromium.

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> Brief search shows that these dev interfaces would have the ability to access the user's PC outside of the Chrome sandbox.

Aren't they just the APIs in https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch#chromium/src/p...? By the looks of it they're just things that aren't ready for primetime, not things that are special dev-only debug tools or whatever.

Well there is

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch#chromium/src/p...

and

https://src.chromium.org/chrome/trunk/src/ppapi/c/extensions...

I haven't looked deeply, but both seem to allow for access outside the sandbox. Maybe a chromium committer could give more detail on the safety of the dev interfaces. They are blocked from public usage for a reason though.

They don't enable access outside the sandbox and should be pretty safe.

PPB_Testing_Dev is a set of helpers for writing tests: querying status of the plugin; running nested message loop to wait for results of async operations; simulate input events which are received only by the plugin itself.

PPB_Ext_Events_Dev is for registering/unregistering events provided by Chrome apps apis (http://developer.chrome.com/apps/api_index.html). It will only be accessible when the NaCl module is included in a Chrome app. This interface hasn't been implemented yet.

which parts of the above code/api allow access outside of the sandbox?

Eh, using structs for namespacing in C. I hadn't seen that in a while.

> In effect, this gives Google remote code execution rights from their domains on anybody running Chromium.

If you're running Chrome, you've already given them code execution rights – the only thing this does is make it slightly harder to detect.

With DNS hijack, everyone can remote execute.

No, HTTPS only. So probably only Google or the NSA, I guess.

Well, it's not like you can't buy a valid certificate for google.com from a turkish CA that is trusted by all browsers... This has happened before, the only question is how much you're willing to pay.

There's also hardcoded HSTS pining for Google certificates, preventing this.

How does HSTS deal with expired certs?

I only use Chrome to access Google apps/docs/gmail, since it seems to work better than other browsers for this. Looking like it might be worth setting up a VM appliance for this now.

Firefox is more performant on my Ubuntu box than Chromium, even for things like Gmail and Google Docs.

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