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Defeat online bank Trojans with one of these.

By John E Dunn
29 October 10

It's still a case of Mozilla Firefox v Internet Explorer v Google Chrome in most debates about browser security, which ends with a back and forth on which sees the most critical vulnerabilities, which has the best sandboxing architecture (or any sandboxing architecture), and which offers the best plug-in complements.

If that threesome sounds a bit limited there is also a fourth option, the Norwegian-made Opera, and perhaps Apple’s Safari for Windows deserves to be taken seriously too. But are these browsers generally now so exposed that it is now longer safe to use any of them?

One route is to abandon popular browsers altogether for a specialist ‘secure’ browser built to be secure above all other considerations. There are now a number of these around, most of which are free.

A second and more radical possibility, discussed later on, is to abandon any browser that runs on Windows, period. The assumption behind this approach is simple: if it is not running on Microsoft then it matters not which vulnerabilities it has because it is simply vastly less likely to be targeted.

For the record, we recently looked at a third possibility, that of adding security plug-ins to one of the popular browsers. That is a valid approach but for this article we assume that what the user wants is something harder – a fully secure browser.

There are different ideas as to what exactly makes a browser ‘secure’. Some deploy a range of hardening techniques while others involve starting a protected ‘virtual’ machine within Windows. A final but more extreme approach is to boot into the browser from scratch using a different operating system.

Currently, all three will work effectively because criminals trying to break browser security assume a vanilla setup used by the overwhelming majority of their targets. As time goes on and more users start using protected browsers, some of these assumptions will have to be revisted.

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