Comment by mconley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mconley | Hacker News Reader

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(Full disclosure - I'm an engineer that's working on multi-process Firefox).

> Add-ons come in two flavors, "old" and "new" (Jetpack). This feature is only available to "old" add-ons. The direction with Firefox has been to narrow what add-ons can do.

This is false.

SDK (Jetpack) add-ons can do everything that "old" add-ons can do. The SDK just offers nicer APIs to allow add-on authors to do common things, and adds a layer to help protect add-on authors against changes in Firefox's code-base (the SDK has very strict deprecation policies, for example). Another advantage of SDK add-ons is that, if all goes well, very few (if any) SDK-based add-ons will need to be changed in order to work in multi-process Firefox. The SDK API layer will change to accommodate multi-process, and SDK-based add-ons should "just work".

js-ctypes, which this blog post talks about, is very much accessible from SDK-based add-ons[1]. SDK-based add-ons can also get direct access to the same old-style XPCOM components that power "old" add-ons[2].

Nothing about the SDK makes those add-ons weaker - if anything, it makes them more resilient to change.

[1]: Here's a simple SDK add-on I wrote to quickly crash the selected tab in multi-process Firefox: https://github.com/mikeconley/tab-crasher It uses js-ctypes to dereference a null pointer and segfault the content process.

[2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK/Low-Level_AP... - but note the "unstable" header, since the interfaces for these components are not frozen, which makes add-ons that use them more prone to incompatibility across Firefox versions.

I didn't think that "Cu.import("resource://gre/modules/ctypes.jsm")" was allowed in a Firefox add-on.

This is bad. Add-ons should not be allowed that much power. Especially since Wips has been buying up add-ons and putting in adware and spyware.[1][2][3] It looks like if you have the right connections, you can get malware approved into Firefox.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/blocksite/ [2] http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=2737553 [3] http://www.howtogeek.com/180175/warning-your-browser-extensi...

That blocksite looks pretty annoying, but according to our Add-on Dev Relations Lead (jorgev), since the tracking in blocksite is "opt in", it doesn't actually violate any of the AMO policies.

Note that I haven't actually installed the add-on or looked at the source[1], but just echoing what I'm reading in this bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=903799

"Add-ons should not be allowed that much power" - this is tricky. We want add-ons to be powerful enough that users can customize Firefox to their liking down to the tiniest detail. And yet, we want to make sure that the add-ons are not doing completely evil things to your machine.

Our solution to that problem is code review and static analysis of add-ons that are submitted to AMO. For add-ons that you install outside of AMO... well, you're on your own there.

It's tricky. We do very much want to make the browser safer for our users, and eliminating evil add-ons is high on our list of priorities, but there's a lot of stop energy put against our solutions[2].

I'm not in charge of add-ons, but I the predicament is clear. Add-on authors want the power to make the browser do amazing things. Users want add-ons to do amazing things. Bad actors want add-ons to do evil things. We want to protect the user, but we also want to respect the user's right to do or install whatever they'd like on their machines.

It's a fine balance.

[1]: Which is something our AMO editors do - they review the source of all add-ons that go up to AMO.

[2]: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/02/10/extension-signing... is one solution we're going after. Check out the comments for some of the fors and againsts.

"According to our Add-on Dev Relations Lead (jorgev), since the tracking in blocksite is "opt in", it doesn't actually violate any of the AMO policies."

I know, but it says something about the Mozilla Foundation that they let that through.

It says that they value their user's freedom? Including the freedom to apply footguns to themselves if they are clearly told that they are dealing with a footgun?

Also note that spying on the user can be done without system-level access. Since addons generally are allowed to do arbitrary XHRs anyway, so they can just record in-browser data and send it via XHR. No access to the filesystem needed. So this issue is somewhat orthogonal to access to the rest of the system, besides the aspect that a malicious addon can do more damage that way. It can still be malicious when restricted to just the browser.

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