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Comment by blondin | Hacker News Reader

it is interesting that most of the CVEs are "use after free". instead of being stuck in an endless cycle of detection and patching, maybe, it's time we consider better ways...

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Ah, yes, I’m sure the Chrome team is entirely unfamiliar with ways to improve memory safety. Snark aside, every browser vendor is working on this, it’s just that migrating is nontrivial.

What approaches are being considered here out of interest? I’m only familiar with Firefox’s use of Rust, but haven’t heard anything about other browsers trying to use that particular approach.

The edge team have talked about it a bit in the following blog posts:

https://microsoftedge.github.io/edgevr/posts/Super-Duper-Sec...

https://microsoftedge.github.io/edgevr/posts/Introducing-Enh...

That's... wow. This is incredible.

What they've found is that JIT can be disabled in most sites with no user-visible impact.

This, combined with WebAssembly, is a game-changer in waiting for browser security.

The biggest coming change is raw_ptr wrapper to replace raw pointers stored in structs and classes. Presently in Chromium it is no-op, but soon will be replaced by a non-trivial implementation that will instantly crash on use-after-free.

The raw_ptr/BackupRefPtr/MiraclePtr [1] mitigation will change the security industry. It is quite a feat what Chromium is doing.

[1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/ddc017f9569...

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