Security News > 2024 > March > Google Chrome gets real-time phishing protection later this month

Google will roll out a Safe Browsing update later this month that will provide real-time malware and phishing protection to all Chrome users, without compromising their browsing privacy.

"Safe Browsing already protects more than 5 billion devices worldwide, defending against phishing, malware, unwanted software and more. In fact, Safe Browsing assesses more than 10 billion URLs and files every day, showing more than 3 million user warnings for potential threats," said Google's Jasika Bawa and Jonathan Li. "If we suspect a site poses a risk to you or your device, you'll see a warning with more information. By checking sites in real time, we expect to block 25% more phishing attempts. The new capability - also rolling out to Android later this month - uses encryption and other privacy-enhancing techniques to ensure that no one, including Google, knows what website you're visiting."

The users' partially hashed URLs are relayed to Google's Safe Browsing engine via an OHTTP privacy server that hides their IP addresses and mixes the hash checks with those sent from other users' web browsers for added privacy protection.

"The privacy server then removes potential user identifiers such as your IP address and forwards the encrypted hash prefixes to the Safe Browsing server. The privacy server is operated independently by Fastly, meaning that Google doesn't have access to potential user identifiers from the original request," Google explained in a separate blog post.

Google announced the Safe Browsing real-time phishing protection feature in September when the company also shared its plans to use privacy-preserving Fastly Oblivious HTTP relays to collect hashed URLs for checking without exposing users' IP addresses and request headers.

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https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-chrome-gets-real-time-phishing-protection-later-this-month/