Google Chrome has an API accesible only from *.google.com
twitter.com
twitter.com
My guess is that Google will react to this Twitter thread by simply deleting it. Hangouts has been a dead product for a while; if their server side code still uses it they can surely remove it as presumably the Chrome team monitor WebRTC performance themselves in a multi-site way now, given the much wider usage.
(but yeah it would just be easier to yoink it)
I worked at Google, and I can guarantee ya people don't go back and change names in old code for the latest rebrand done for eyewash 4 layers above me. Not out of laziness, either, it just has 0 value and is risky.
Also, video conference perf was/is a pretty big deal (c.f. variety of sibling comments pointing out where it is used, from gSuite admin to client app). It is great on ye olde dev machine but it's very, very hard on $300 WintelChromebook thrown at line-level employees
FWIW, they shouldn't have hacked this in, I do not support it. And I bet they'll just delete it anyway because it shouldn't have been there in the first place. Some line-level employee slapped it in because, in the wise words of Ian Hickson: "Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision."
(I swear, sometimes I think the Internet has goldfish-memory. I remember when getting videoconferencing to work in a browser was a miracle, and why we wanted it in the first place).
Pretending you said something conversational, like: "is that quote accurate in this case? The API may have literally enabled the creation of video conferencing. I, for one, remember we didn't used to have it."
I see.
So your contention is:
- if anyone thinks a statsd web API, hidden in Chrome, available only to Google websites is worth questioning
- they're insufficiently impressed by video conferencing existing
If I have that right:
I'm not sure those two things are actually related.
If you worked at Google, I'm very intrigued by the idea we can only collect metrics via client side web API for statsd, available only to Google domains.
If you work in software, I'm extremely intrigued by the idea video conferencing wouldn't exist without client site web API for statsd, available only to Google domains.
If you have more details on either, please, do share
But yes, I don't doubt that the data collection was pretty vital for getting Hangouts to the point it got to. And I do strongly suspect that it got us to browser-based video conferencing sooner than we would have been otherwise; the data collected got fed into the eventual standards that enable video conferencing in browsers today.
"Could not have" is too strong, but I think "could not have this soon" might be quite true. There was an explosion of successful technologies in a brief amount of time that were enabled by Google and other online service providers doing big data collection to solve some problems that had dogged academic research for decades.
After your infelicitous contribution, you were politely invited to consider _a client side web API only on Google domains for CPU metrics_ isn't necessary for _collecting client metrics_.
To be perfectly clear: they're orthogonal. Completely unrelated.
For some reason, you instead read it as an invitation to continue fantasizing about WebRTC failing to exist without it
(Worth noting: Google Hangouts predates WebRTC. I think a case can be made that big data collection of real users machine performance in the real world was instrumental for hammering out the last mile issues in Hangouts, which informed WebRTC's design. I'm sure we would have gotten there eventually, my contention is it would have taken longer without concrete metrics about performance).
+------------------+
| Web Browser |
| +--------------+ |
| | WebRTC | |
| | Components | |
| +------+-------+ |
| | |
| +------v-------+ | +---------------+
| | Browser's | | | Website |
| | Internal | | | (e.g. Google |
| | Telemetry | | | Meet) |
| +------+-------+ | | |
| | | | (No direct |
| +------v-------+ | | access to |
| | CPU Stats | | | CPU stats) |
| | (Internal) | | | |
+------------------+ +---------------+
|
| WebRTC metrics
| (including CPU stats as needed)
v
+------------------+
| Google Servers |
| (Collect WebRTC |
| metrics) |
+------------------+
I am referring to two alternatives to consider:
A) Chrome sends CPU usage metrics, for any WebRTC domain, in C++
B) as described in TFA: JavaScript, running on allow-listed Google sites only, collect CPU usage via a JavaScript web API
There's no need to do B) to launch/improve/instrument WebRTC, in fact, it would be bad to only do B), given WebRTC implementers is a much less biased sample for WebRTC metrics than Google implementers of WebRTC.
I've tried to avoid guessing at what you're missing, but since this has dragged out for a day, I hope you can forgive me for guessing here:
I think you think there's a _C++ metrics API for WebRTC in Chrome-only, no web app access_ that _only collects WebRTC on Google domains_, and from there we can quibble about whether its better to have an unbiased sample or if its Google attempting to be a good citizen via collecting data from Google domains.
That's not the case.
We are discussing a _JavaScript API_ available only to _JavaScript running on Google domains_ to access CPU metrics.
Additional color commentary to further shore up there isn't some WebRTC improvement loop this helps with:
- I worked at Google, and it would be incredibly bizarre to collect metrics for improvements via B) instead of A).
- We can see via the rest of the thread this is utilized _not for metrics_, but for features such as gSuite admins seeing CPU usage metrics on VC, and CPU usage displayed in Meet in a "Having a problem?" section that provides debug info.
JS is easier to debug (even with Google's infrastructure), and they have no need of everyone else's videoconference telemetry (which when this was added, would have been, iirc, Flash-based).
I believe the things they learned via this closed loop let Google learn things that informed the WebRTC standard, hence my contention it got us there faster. Unless I've missed something, this API was collecting data since 2008. WebRTC was 3 years later.
I think you've misunderstood my question regarding "What would the alternative be?" I meant what would the alternative be to collecting stats data via a private API only on Google domains when we didn't have a standard for performance collection in browsers? We certainly don't want Google railroading one into the public (with all the security concerns that would entail). And I guess I'm just flat out not surprised that they would have dropped one into their browser to simplify debugging a very performance intensive service that hadn't been supported in the browser outside plugins before. Is your contention that they should have gone the flash route and done a binary as a plug-in, then put telemetry in the binary? Google had (And mostly still has) a very web-centric approach; doing it as a binary wouldn't be in their DNA.
But the Git history of it is fascinating, starting at the initial merge that got it in that went with the old school trick of "just call X to explain why this is needed" to get your stuff merged. Then every non-trivial change ever to it is inevitably auto-reverted due to some failure before being resubmitted, this must be the "unparalleled Google developer environment" in action - nobody can or bothers to run the tests on a piece of software this big. Half the commits are various formatting nonsense. One third is my favorite - someone making a change to an extension API only to realize the fucking hangout guys sneaked an actual extension into the code base and they will have to update that one to reflect their change. I can feel their anger personally.
Edit: I guess if you only want to make a local debug tool, you could make it callable only from a completely isolated sandbox. Maybe?
Create an API for starting a "performance-metrics visualization Service Worker", that takes two things from a page as input:
1. the service-worker script URL
2. the handle of a freshly-allocated WebGL Canvas (which may or may not already be attached to the DOM, but which has never yet received any WebGL calls.) This Canvas will have its ownership moved to the Service Worker, leaving the object in the page as only an opaque reference to the Canvas.
The resulting Service Worker will live in a sandbox such that it 1. doesn't have network access, 2. can receive postMessage calls, but not make them; and 3. doesn't have any write access to any storage mechanism. Other than drawing on the Canvas, it's a pure consumer.
Also, obviously, this special sandbox grants the Service Worker the ability to access this performance API, with the metrics being measured in the context of the page that started the Worker.
The Service Worker is then free to use the info it gathers from making perf API calls, to draw metrics onto the moved Canvas. It's also free to change how/what it's drawing, or quit altogether, in response to control messages posted to it from the page.
The page can't introspect the moved Canvas to see what the Service Worker has drawn. All it can do is use the Canvas's now-opaque handle to attach/detach it to the DOM.
For example by using up resources like the cpu, the gpu or ram in timed intervalls. The page would then probe for the performance fluctuations of these resources and decode the data from the pattern of the fluctuations.
(I imagine, if such measurements done by pages are at-all distinguishable from noise, that they are already being exfiltrated by any number of JS user-fingerprinting scripts.)
The issue with the API is that it provides specifics about the CPU like "Apple M2 Max". If you give this info to a worker, the worker can encode it into a side-channel and send it to the page.
But at that point, you've gone so far to neutering the page-controlled Service Worker, that having a page-controlled Service Worker would be a bit pointless. If the Service Worker can only do exactly one WebGL API call for each metric timeseries datapoint it receives, then the particular call it's going to be making is something you could predict perfectly in advance given the datapoint. So at that point, why have the page specify it? Just let the browser figure out how to render the chart.
So I revised the design to do exactly that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40929284
1. Rather than having the page-perf API be a Web API "only available on specific origins" or "only available to weirdly-sandboxed Service Workers", just make it a WebExtension API. One with its own WebExtension manifest capability required to enable it; where each browser vendor would only accept WebExtensions requesting that particular capability into their Extension Stores after very thorough vetting.
(Or in fact, maybe browser vendors would never accept third-party WebExtensions with this capability into their Extension Stores; and for each browser, the capability would only be used in a single extension, developed by the browser vendor themselves. This would then be analogous to the existing situation, where the Web API is only available on a first-party domain controlled by the browser vendor; but as this would rely on the existing WebExtensions capabilities model, there would be no need for a separate one-off "WebAPI but locked to an origin" security-model. Also, unlike with a "WebAPI but locked to an origin" capability, you could play with this capability locally in an unpacked extension!)
2. Browsers that want to offer this "visualize the performance of the current page" ability as a "thing the browser can do", would just bundle their first-party WebExtension that holds this capability [and the "access current tab" capability] as a pre-installed + force-enabled component of the browser, hidden from the extensions management view. (I believe that this is already a thing browsers do — e.g. I believe Chrome implements its PDF viewer this way.)
3. This WebExtension would consist, at its core, of an extension page (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...), that could be embedded into webpages as an iframe. This extension page would contain a script, which would use the WebExtension version of the page-perf API to continuously probe/monitor "the tab this instance of the extension-page document lives within." On receiving a perf sample, this script would then render the sample as a datapoint, in a chart that lives in some sense in the extension page's own DOM. There'd be no Service Worker necessary.
(Though, for efficiency reasons, the developer of this WebExtension might still want to split the perf-API polling out into a Service Worker, as a sort of "weak-reference perf provider" that the extension page subscribes to messages from + sends infrequent keepalive polls to. This would ensure that the Service Worker would unload — and so stop polling the page-perf API — both whenever the extension page's tab goes inactive, and whenever the browser unloads extension Service Workers generally [e.g. whenever the lid of a laptop is closed.] The page-perf API could itself be made to work this way... but it's easier to take advantage of the existing semantics of Service Worker lifetimes, no?)
4. But is there an existing API that allows a web-origin page to access/embed an extension page, without knowing the extension's (browser-specific) extension ID? Yes! Just like native apps can register "app intents", WebExtensions can register URI protocol handlers! (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...) The performance-visualization WebExtension would register a protocol_handler for e.g. ext+pageperf:// , and then a page that wants to render its own perf would just create an <iframe allowTransparency="true" src="ext+pageperf://..." /> and shove it into the DOM. The privileged-origin-separation restrictions for iframes, would then stop the (web-origin, lower-privilege-level) page from introspecting the DOM inside the (extension-origin, higher-privilege-level) iframe — accomplishing the same thing that the "make the Canvas into an opaque handle" concept did in the previous design, but relying 100% on already-standardized security semantics of existing browser features.
---
But how would the webpage style the extension page to match itself? Well, that depends on what the extension page is doing to render the metrics.
An elegant assumption would be that the page-perf extension page is creating + incrementally updating an SVG DOM that lives embedded in the page's DOM — on each frame, appending new vector elements (e.g. bezier control-points) to that SVG's DOM to represent new datapoints in the time-series. (I believe e.g. Grafana's charting logic works this way.)
If this is the case, then all the parent page needs, is a way to pass a regular old CSS stylesheet to the extension page; which the extension page could then embed directly into its own <head>. Just have the parent page construct a <style> Element, and then call:
perfIframe.postMessage('applyStyles', {transfer: constructedStyleElement})
---
And all of this would be easily made cross-browser. You'd need a little standalone "Browser Support for Embedded Performance Visualizations" spec, that specifies two things:
1. a well-known URI scheme, for each browser's built-in page-perf extension to register a protocol_handler for. (Since it's standardized, they can drop the "ext+" part — it can just be `pageperf://`.)
2. a fixed structure for the page-perf extension page's metrics-visualization DOM — i.e. a known hierarchy of elements with specific `id` and `class` attributes (think CSS Zen Garden) — so that the same webpage-author-supplied stylesheets will work to style every browser's own metrics-chart implementation. (This would seem constraining, but remember that WebComponents exist. Standardize a WebComponent for the metrics chart, and how styles affect it. Browser vendors are then free to implement that WebComponent however they like in their own impl of the extension. Very similar to how browser vendors are free to implement the internals of a new HTML element, actually — in fact, in theory, for maximum efficiency, browsers could even implement this WebComponent's shadow-DOM in their renderers in terms of a custom "internal" HTML element!)
I worked for a time on Google's internal videoconferencing platform, called GVC. This was in 2010-2011 at a time when a lot of the company's VC equipment was proprietary, specifically Cisco Tandberg units. These were expensive and would be expensive to roll out to thousands of meeting rooms.
around this time a different team was developing Hangouts. It's been awhile so my memory may be off but I think it was called Google Meet at the time? or maybe that was later? It's hard to keep track. I think Hangouts was the name adopted when Google+ came along and rolled Hangouts into its product offering.
There were different configurations of GVC but the most common were these All-in-One ("AIO") monitor/computer combos. It was a full Intel PC. So the GVC platform was a custom Linux distro. The system was designed so GVCs could talk to Google services, which was nontrivial, and so software updates could be rolled out. It kept old distros too in case one didn't boot. These GVCs had to be named and a whole bunch of other issues.
Additionally they needed support for various hardware like a touch panel to dial. Larger units required larger PTZ camera support and support for various microphones.
Anyway, Hangouts became the stack GVC was built on. This ultimately replaced virtually all Tandbergs and saved a fortune. This system was certainly still in use by 2017. I can't speak for later.
Monitoring was a part of all this. So when I see there are *.google.com specific APIs, we need to be sure we're talking about this accurately. Like can Google query any Chrome instance in the world? Or is it only from/to google.com? I don't know the answer and the Tweet doesn't specify.
But given the name hangouts_services and the domain restriction I consider it highly likely this is purely to support monitoring embedded Chrome for GVC. I could be wrong.
So it's possible most of Google didn't even know this was possible until know.
Until know.
Now there's probably DOZENS of Product Managers approaching their product's tech lead going "OK, now...hear me out...."
yeah sure, no Google PMs are seeing this /s
P.S. The naming confusion always comes up. GVC is such a nice clear name.
Here[0] are the docs for the specific one discussed above, for example.
0. https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/s...
In fact, that’s literally how other videoconferencing websites operate and have been since forever (the dreaded cisco webex extension comes to mind). The only difference is that GMeet can be counted as a part of the browser itself, so it requires no additional extension.
That is the enraging part. If I install extensions, I am aware that they could send information and diagnostic stuff. Plain websites shouldn't be able to. Also (not 100% sure here), afaik Firefox tells me which information the extension gets, so there's even more awareness about the information sent.
Also, which VC websites are you talking about? Zoom doesn't need a extension, BigBlueButton and Jitsy don't need a extension, afaik Teams also doesn't need it. People using WebEx certainly don't care about privacy so actually I would leave that out. (Googled it, since I never use it: apparently WebEx also doesn't use an extension anymore, although I remember the old plugin that they required some time ago, that barely worked at all)
That's the part that is arguably an antitrust violation.
See e.g. https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-browser-bundling-ba...
The other I can remember is original Hangouts about a decade ago, cause at the time WebRTC wasn't commonly supported. Chrome was the only browser that didn't need an extension for that, but you know what, other VC apps were free to use Chrome's early WebRTC features too, and they later did.
Obviously that’d go nowhere and no one would use it, but I can’t imagine this really matters to any competitor anywhere.
If you think about it, what value is there in all these companies using the same roads to ship products? Can't they build their own? And is it really important that every business accept the same currency?
Yes, platform independence and shared universal access to common standards that consumers can consistently trust to provide similar experiences across products and ecosystems does admittedly reduce wasted development resources, increase competition, and makes the market more accessible to new businesses. And sure, I guess technically it reduces consumer confusion, and sure it benefits consumers by making products and services more interoperable. But who are we to say that any of that is good? /s
I'm sorry, I don't understand the distinction you're trying to make? Yes, it sounds like the API is exposed just to the content running on *.google.com, but that's still a lot like "Google can query any Chrome instance" (that visits their site, but that's ~100% given that even if you don't visit Google services, Chrome pulls in NTP content from Google by default).
I don't think this is being used maliciously, but it's still problematic if Google can troubleshoot problems this way, and their competitors in the same space can't. There's no API for Zoom, right?
I would theorize the reason Google doesn't go through that process is that it's unrealistic to expect users en mass to do that, and the only way to get wide rollout would be to build it into a browser by default and then for good measure to hide the fact that it's installed -- something which, notably, Zoom can't do.
But I mean, if it's no big deal to get users to install an extension, then Google can stop bundling it by default and instead ask users to install it, right?
You're saying the reason the 'retail' Google Chrome has this bundled plugin is so Google can get observability on CPU usage on internal appliances for an internal video conferencing platform?
As for "retail" Chrome having this plugin, it would make total sense. Chrome is a massive codebase. Maintaining a fork is a significant amount of effort. It would be far easier to add APIs to Chrome and whitelist them for only google.com extensions/JS.
You can try it for yourself, just
chrome.runtime.sendMessage("nkeimhogjdpnpccoofpliimaahmaaome", {"method":"cpu.getInfo"}, (resp) => { console.log(resp); });
Bundle Hangouts Services extension with Chrome
BUG=291271
Review URL: https://codereview.chromium.org/35873003
A blog post about it was shared here on Hacker news <12 months ago, but I'm having trouble finding it...
apis are public, documented and the domain allowlist is both included in the UI and about:config (save from android playstore version where they hide everything to make the browser pure garbage for whatever reason)
and I'm pretty sure devs would at least think about adding your domain by default if you ask nicely with a great use case on bugzilla.
It's pretty standard among browsers. The risk should be about equal to someone spoofing the domains that the browser downloads software updates from, and you can turn it off via prefs if you really don't want it.
(Not that this is not the same thing as a website developer adding browser-specific hacks to make their site behave better/worse in a particular browser.)
This could possibly also be a violation of anti-trust laws since it is using a monopoly in one market (browsers) to get an advantage in another (video conferencing).
As for the anti-trust aspect, here the market share matters and Firefox is insignificant in that regard.
I think the explanation is quite mundane. An example usage: open google meet, start an empty meeting (an “instant meeting”), click the “…” menu, click “troubleshooting and help”.
There’ll be plots of various stats, including CPU utilization. I think meet will also helpfully suggest closing tabs if your machine is overloaded during a meet call, too.
It’s very helpful, I check it from time to time.
Edit: now that I think about it, I’m not sure about the suggestion to close tabs is actually a thing. I’ve only actually used the stats view.
I guess I just don't see the problem in a feature like this in a third party browser software that is completely optional to install and use and has lots of alternatives.
But yeah, having that build into your browser is a huge advantage over having to nag your users to install an extension or worse convincing the IT department that it's worth installing.
Edit: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/s... seems to provide that, though
my guess would also include some nifty debug info from FLoC ;)
Very cool of you as a Google employee to say the quiet part out loud for us.
Edit: And for some reason I have a Chrome profile even though I never created one and never "logged into" Chrome. Another thing that's been forced on me by Google's product team.
But even that does not explain why the existence of the API was not disclosed. Do you agree that that looks bad for them?
Then there is the fact that Google is far from being a company people trust. They should be rushing to be transparent about their decision, if there is a good, persuasive reason for it. They could use the good press. Instead, they made a secret API that can read privileged system information, locked it so that nobody else could use it, and then never told anybody about it—all while claiming to be secure, and privacy-focused, and definitely not abusing their browser monopoly.
The existence of the API is documented: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/s...
To me it looks like Google wants to use some analytics on Google Meet to improve it (e.g. a/b testing on CPU consumption), or they just want to provide that interactive CPU% widget in it, but they don't think it would be a good idea to let just any website use it, as it can could be used for fingerprinting (e.g. if you have two different sites open in separate tabs, they could detect this by co-operating to correlate the CPU% time series data, even if the connections are over Tor or proxies).
For non-Google services they provide a mechanism to do the same by having the customer install an extension with the correct permission.
A user might reasonably expect that web pages do not have access to the system.cpu API by default. And that's mostly true, but thanks to the pre-installed but hidden hangout_services extension, google.com does have access to this API. That's at least a little dubious.
> There’ll be plots of various stats, including CPU utilization. I think meet will also helpfully suggest closing tabs if your machine is overloaded
This is not mundane at all, it's a perfect example of giving your product an unfair competitive advantage.
If Meet users are told why their meeting isn't working correctly but Zoom, Teams and Slack, Meet users are going to have a better experience that Zoom, Teams or Slack has no way of replicating.
No wonder every other meeting provider pushes you aggressively into using their desktop app, Google Meet's desktop app is just Chrome!
I had to re-read this a few times; did you accidentally omit a word?
> If Meet users are told why their meeting isn't working correctly but Zoom, Teams and Slack aren't, Meet users are going to have a better experience that Zoom, Teams or Slack has no way of replicating.
I fully agree with you, though; it's anticompetitive for them to use Chrome to give their other products an advantage.
For PCs with dedicated GPUs, Nvidia's matrix doesn't even mention VP8/9 encoding, and for decode there are a lot of VP8/9 "no"s for GPUs that have "yes" for H.264: https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-and-decode-gpu-sup...
AV1 looks like it's getting broader support, but it's still new. Zoom's release notes mention they'll use AV1 if the participants support it, and I don't see a similar note about VP8/9.
(I’ve tried Safari, I’ve tried the native app, and I’ve even tried the phone bridge (!).)
This explanation was the first I read of what this actually does (yeah, yeah, I didn’t read the linked article first) and that’s a lot worse than I expected.
But that is not at all my point. The point is that google.com web properties have access to an API and a browser capability that is not available to it's competitors. Google only allows reading CPU info for itself.
The reason the data is not available for everyone, is because it would be a huge tracking vector. Same reason we don't allow webpages to read the device hostname, or username, or Chrome profile name. Google exposes this to google.com because it trusts itself. That poses this antitrust issue though.
Perhaps this is one reason why Meet performs well in the browser and Zoom doesn't, meaning Zoom users use the native app if they want reasonable performance (particularly with many people in the meeting).
Do you have any evidence that the current Zoom client is "malware"?
Chrome has a built-in extension that uses public Chrome APIs that are easily available to other Chrome extensions. The issue described is that this extension shares this information to Google's own domains when they're communicating with the extension, while other websites can't do this.
There's no "special hidden API".
"hidden" in the sense that when I go to chrome://extensions it is not listed.
And as you already mentioned, it's a Chrome API.
It would be silly if that PWA-implemented browser code would need permission to access the system information, since it is part of the browser's functionality itself.
Another use case for a private API (that has long existed) is integration of the Chrome browser with Google-specific websites that provide core functionality, like the Chrome Web store, to allow for installation/removal of extensions from a web page.
Down-thread I see that this is being used for Google Meet functionality, for which I agree it should ask for the user's permission.
Yes. We need much more of this on the desktop.
To prompt the user for every type of IPC would make the software unusable. No desktop software does that on any platform.
It would be like a car asking the user for permission for the steering wheel to access the front axle.
If there exists a mundane and reasonable explanation for this, that doesn’t matter if there also exists a potential to exploit it in a way that harms consumers’ interests.
chrome.runtime.sendMessage(
'nkeimhogjdpnpccoofpliimaahmaaome', {
method: 'cpu.getInfo'
}, response => {
console.log('CPU Info:\n', JSON.stringify(response, null, 2));
}
);By controlling the engine, they have de facto control over the standards.
By keeping Chromium open, they incentivise forks. Most people who don't want to use Chrome because it's Google's or for some other reason will use one of the forks or Chromium-based browsers.
By keeping this illusion of choice, Google extends its control.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/s...
You can see all the permissions requested by this extension here:
https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:chr...
If you don’t want to use Google’s browser, don’t use Google’s browser.
Edit, if it’s not obvious: an unclaimed domain with special permissions is a massive security hole.
If this flag is true then the extension is added: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:chr... and https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:chr...
Always wondered how it's implemented in JS. WebAuthn with proprietary arguments...?
This is allowing Google to do something TO you that no one else can do to you, and that you assumed no one could do to you.
So I guess the question becomes how quickly you can spoof this ?
What I have learned in place of that is plug holes to minimize attack vectors.
Wow some attack you got there.
But you could have teams with DNS zone delegation who can.create.anything.like.this.google.com
If that malicious actor can install a custom ca too, they can already install whatever spyware they want.
I don't know what setting up a new domain is like but I can't imagine it's something you "just do".
Only to leak your CPU/GPU utilization though as far as I understand it. Those can also be exposed in other ways by legitimate JS/WebGPU by measuring/profiling shader runs/etc.
That file was very telling to be honest and was well commenter. Firefox has a similar file.
> So, Google Chrome gives all *.google.com sites full access to system / tab CPU usage, GPU usage, and memory usage. It also gives access to detailed processor information, and provides a logging backchannel.
Those things can absolutely be used to "improve" fingerprinting. I don't think it's fair to assume it's being used for that though, without any further evidence. But it certainly could be used for it.
Anyone have any further context? As it stands right now, it's just a random claim without any proof what so ever? There is link in another comment, but how is that related to the tweet?
Maybe in this situation we should distinguish "fair" vs. "probable".
I'd guess it's improbable that Google is trying to use this for fingerprinting.
But if we've previously found them with their hand in the cookie jar, then maybe it's fair to treat them as guilty until proven innocent?
I would not be surprised if there are cases where this would let them track users they otherwise couldn't. Like someone running two isolated Chrome instances with separate network connections but on the same PC.
chrome.runtime.sendMessage(
'nkeimhogjdpnpccoofpliimaahmaaome', {
method: 'cpu.getInfo'
}, response => {
console.log('CPU Info:\n', JSON.stringify(response, null, 2));
}
);
{
"value": {
"archName": "arm64",
"features": [],
"modelName": "Apple M2 Max",
"numOfProcessors": 12,
"processors": [
{
"usage": {
"idle": 26879793,
"kernel": 5270058,
"total": 42511068,
"user": 10361217
}
},
{
"usage": {
"idle": 27925505,
"kernel": 5045974,
"total": 42900999,
"user": 9929520
}
},
{
"usage": {
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Actually, do modern Macs even allow normal software to discover the CPU ID?
It's turning (and mostly has already turned) into the new Internet Explorer.
Use Safari or Firefox, or any other browser that's not based on Chromium.
Isn't that implemented in a similar way to this?
I agree with the concerns about unfair competition, and I think this auto-login "feature" could also qualify as an example.
It should be possible to point to the source code of whatever google.com extensions that may exist.
Or is this only available in the packaged distributions of Chrome?
I'm not saying it's right/wrong, just that no evidence was presented.
now, is it bad that it is being done at all or that only google.com host requests can access it?
personally i see the value during debugging but having it forced enabled this way (also for only one company) is not great and should be remedied.
The extension ID is: nkeimhogjdpnpccoofpliimaahmaaome
https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/?policy=ExtensionIn...
Every Chromium-based browser has 'hidden' APIs only accessible on certain domains. That's how the custom (read: closed source) extensions work. "Component extensions" are used to interact with them normally: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/extens...
See https://blogs.opera.com/security/2021/09/8000-bug-bounty-hig... and https://blogs.opera.com/security/2021/09/bug-bounty-guest-po... for examples of when there are vulnerabilities in those extensions, and how they can be abused for remote code execution.
Any whitelisted domains for these APIs cannot be written to using user-installed extensions, in order for a malicious extension to not be able to inject a script and execute the special API.
At Opera, we previously tried attacking the underlying implementation about how these 'hidden' APIs are accessible. Although we found a lot of Opera-specific issues, the Chromium logic seems sound and a "bypass" for other websites accessing the API is unlikely. It also seems that the developer here was just a bit overzealous in allowing this API to be accessed from all google.com subdomains.
[Google's browser] comes with [code] that [does things] in a default installation of [Google's browser] that [Google's competitors] can't do in a default installation of [Google's browser].
Ostensibly [Google's websites] are websites like any other, but [Google's browser] treats them differently. IIRC Mozilla does similar things for addons.mozilla.org, but googles seem more broad since they are not as clearly linked to browser functionality.
[0]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/youtube-is-slowing-video-loads...
Is it just Google's competitors, or it is everyone?
I'm still no sure why I should care.
Because the Web is supposed to be based on open standards and browsers are supposed to be neutral platforms that implement the standards.
If you don't care about that, fair: nobody really cares that you don't care. What everybody cares about is what happens if some of the various antitrust agencies of the world start caring.
... but other people remember that in the time since, that entire Microsoft monopoly fiasco is held up as an example of bad prosecution, and we don't go after companies like that anymore.
This, but also, I still don't see anyone posting a compelling reason why I should care about this issue. The government and I don't necessarily have the same interests. Personally I don't care that google gives their own browser more access to my computer when I use google services, and if it improves my experience, I actually want that to be the case.
The bulk of the complaints about this just seem to be tattletale behavior you see from children, not any thought out complaints based upon an actual harm.
If it's "just extension", make it available to all domains.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/s...
Other web pages don't have such access.
That API is baked into Google Chrome. It's hardcoded to only let google.com use it.
The allowlisting going on here is that normally when you install an extension in Chrome it asks you to confirm the access to those APIs on the sites where the extension wants to run, but this one comes pre-confirmed from the factory. A quick GitHub search finds ~1000 manifest files that list system.cpu, possibly because that API is also in the boilerplate example chrome extension manifest.
I think the idea that you will download a web browser from Google and then it won't be able to figure out what model of CPU it is running on is a bit weird, when you think it through. There are lots of features of Chrome that are only "available to Google" for example it will only download updates from Google, unless you've modified its source code.
If true, as usually, a lot of people have a Google tab open, you can easily deduct what it means.
This is definitely something to be investigated, for the moment, we only have a tweet.
No. It uses the chrome.system.cpu API, that any extension can access, which gives CPU and RAM utilization info about your tabs. It doesn't give anyone "a lot of information about all the open tabs", and does nothing to expose your banking website...
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/s...
This is not true.