Security News > 2021 > May > Mozilla Begins Rolling Out 'Site Isolation' Security Feature to Firefox Browser

Mozilla has begun rolling out a new security feature for its Firefox browser in nightly and beta channels that aims to protect users against a new class of side-channel attacks from malicious sites.

"This fundamental redesign of Firefox's Security architecture extends current security mechanisms by creating operating system process-level boundaries for all sites loaded in Firefox for Desktop," Mozilla said in a statement.

"Isolating each site into a separate operating system process makes it even harder for malicious sites to read another site's secret or private data."

The motivation for Site Isolation can be traced all the way back to January 2018 when Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities were publicly disclosed, forcing browser vendors and chipmakers to incorporate defenses to neutralize attacks that could break the boundaries between different applications and allow an adversary to read passwords, encryption keys, and other valuable information directly from a computer's kernel memory.

"Despite existing security mitigations, the only way to provide memory protections necessary to defend against Spectre-like attacks is to rely on the security guarantees that come with isolating content from different sites using the operating system's process separation," Mozilla's Anny Gakhokidze said.

Besides hardening the security of Firefox by offering operating system-level process separation for each site, Site Isolation is also expected to bring other performance benefits, including efficient use of underlying hardware and improved stability, as a subframe or a tab crash will no longer affect other websites or processes.

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