Hacker News Reader

Comment by npace12 | Hacker News Reader

In chrome, you can block network traffic coming from extensions. I built an open-source extension you can check out that does that [1]

1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/little-rat/oiopkpa...

View on HN

Isn't the more common problem that the extension contains malware from Google/FB? (This is definitely the case for phone apps.)

How do you deal with side channels when the page is running javascript that's being served by the attacker?

(Little Rat sounds like a great tool; I've been meaning to check it out.)

for that, you can use ublock. Little Rat can block any traffic originating from a chrome extension. That includes content scripts injected by extensions into webpages, but not sites that you loaded.

I see. That’s pretty good. So, now the attack surface is reduced to the extension author exfiltrating data via burner domains that aren’t blocked by ublock, but that are explicitly added to legitimate web sites.

Nice extension! I installed the full version, but I have no idea what the speaker icon do. Would you mind to explain a little bit more?

I think it just mutes reporting on that extension.

I'm a little puzzled why we only get the speaker icon, yet the screenshots all show the blocking options.

speaker is for muting the alerts so they don't show red badge for that extension

the chrome store version only has blocking. if you install it from github you get all the other options

I'm installed from github, I only see the speakers

screen shot:

https://i.imgur.com/eE06GBY.png

interesting, are you sure you got the latest from the main branch? that looks like an old version

It says 1.0 in the extensions manager, but it was downloaded fresh this evening by clicking on the 'ZIP' link in your readme.md on here:

https://github.com/dnakov/little-rat/tree/main

edit, aha, downloaded the .zip manually rather than via the link, and it has the other icons now, I guess the 'ZIP' link pointing at archive/refs/main results in an older version

ahh thanks, i'll update the link

Is there something like this for Firefox?

There is not. For better or worse, network traffic from browser extensions in Firefox is not visible to other extensions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com