Security News > 2020 > February > Framework Isolates Libraries in Firefox to Improve Security
A group of researchers has built a sandbox framework that can improve the security of Firefox by isolating third-party libraries used by the browser.
Similar to other major browsers, Firefox relies on third-party libraries to render content - such as audio, video, and images - and these libraries often introduce additional vulnerabilities, researchers from the University of California San Diego, University of Texas at Austin, Stanford University and Mozilla say.
To mitigate the issue, the researchers came up with RLBox, a framework that supports sandboxing through either software-based fault isolation or multi-core process isolation, and which is meant to help Firefox run untrusted code.
The general-purpose library-sandboxing framework has already been implemented in production Firefox, to isolate the libGraphite font shaping library, using a WebAssembly sandbox.
"Our retrofitted Firefox successfully tested on both the Firefox Nightly and Beta channels, and ships in stock Firefox 74 to Linux users and in Firefox 75 to Mac users," the researchers note in a whitepaper.