Chromium Blog: safe browsing

Chromium Blog

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Faster and more efficient phishing detection in M92

Tuesday, July 20, 2021

Keeping Chrome users safe as they browse the web is crucially important to Chrome; in fact, security has always been one of our four core principles. In some cases, security can come at the expense of performance. In our next post in The Fast and the Curious series, we are excited to share how improvements to our phishing detection algorithms keeps users safe online. With these improvements, phishing detection is now 50 times faster and drains less battery.Phishing detection

What you will see if a phishing attempt is detected

To preserve your privacy, by default Chrome's Safe Browsing mode never sends any images outside the browser. While this is great for privacy, it means that your machine has to do all the work to analyze the image.

Image processing can often generate heavy workloads because analyzing the image requires an evaluation of each pixel in what is commonly known as a “pixel loop.” Some modern monitors display upwards of 14 million pixels, so even simple operations on each of those pixels can add up to a lot of CPU use! For phishing detection, the operation that takes place on each pixel is the counting of its basic colors.

Here is what this looks like. The counts are stored in an associative data structure called a hashmap. For each pixel, we extract its RGB color values and store the counts in one of 3 different hashmaps -- one for each color.

Making it more efficient

Adding one item to a hashmap is fast, but we have to do this for millions of pixels. We try to avoid reducing the number of pixels to avoid compromising the quality of the analysis. However, the computation itself can be improved.

Our improvements to the pipeline look like this:

The code now avoids keeping track of RGB channels in three different hashmaps and instead uses only one to index by color. Three times less counting!
Consecutive pixels are summed before being counted in the hashmap. For a site with a uniform background color, this can reduce the hashmap overhead to almost nothing.

Here is what the counting of the colors looks like now. Notice how there are significantly fewer operations on the hashmap:

How much faster did this get?

Starting with M92, Chrome now executes image-based phishing classification up to 50 times faster at the 50th percentile and 2.5 times faster at the 99th percentile. On average, users will get their phishing classification results after 100 milliseconds, instead of 1.8 seconds.

This benefits you in two ways as you use Chrome. First and foremost, using less CPU time to achieve the same work improves general performance. Less CPU time means less battery drain and less time with spinning fans.
Second, getting the results faster means Chrome can warn you earlier. The optimization brought the percentage of requests that took more than 5 seconds to process from 16.25% to less than 1.6%. This speed improvement makes a real difference in security - especially when it comes to stopping you from entering your password in a malicious site!
Overall, these changes achieve a reduction of almost 1.2% of the total CPU time used by all Chrome renderer processes and utility processes.
At Chrome’s scale, even minor algorithm improvements can result in major energy efficiency gains in aggregate. Here’s to many more centuries of CPU time saved!

Stay tuned for many more performance improvements to come!

Posted by Olivier Li Shing Tat-Dupuis, Chrome Developer

Data source for all statistics: Real-world data anonymously aggregated from Chrome clients.

Google

Labels: performance , safe browsing , the fast and the curious

New Chrome Protections from Deception

Tuesday, June 18, 2019

Chrome was built with security in mind from the very beginning. Today we’re launching two new features to help protect users from deceptive websites. The Suspicious Site Reporter Extension will improve security for Chrome users by giving power users an easy way to report suspicious sites to Google Safe Browsing. We’re also launching a new warning to protect users from sites with deceptive URLs.

We designed Chrome to be secure by default, and easy to use by everyone. Google Safe Browsing has helped protect Chrome users from phishing attacks for over 10 years, and now helps protect more than 4 billion devices every day across multiple browsers and apps by showing warnings to people before they visit dangerous sites or download dangerous files. We’re constantly improving Safe Browsing, and now you can help.

Safe Browsing works by automatically analyzing the websites that we know about through Google Search’s web crawlers, and creating lists of sites that are dangerous or deceptive. With the Suspicious Site Reporter extension, you can help Safe Browsing protect web users by reporting suspicious sites. You can install the extension to start seeing an icon when you’re on a potentially suspicious site, and more information about why the site might be suspicious. By clicking the icon, you’re now able to report unsafe sites to Safe Browsing for further evaluation. If the site is added to Safe Browsing’s lists, you’ll not only protect Chrome users, but users of other browsers and across the entire web.


	Help us protect web users by reporting dangerous or deceptive sites to Google Safe Browsing through the Suspicious Site Reporter extension.

One way that deceptive sites might try to trick you is by using a confusing URL. For example, it’s easy to confuse “go0gle.com” with “google.com”. In Chrome 75, we’re launching a new warning to direct users away from sites that have confusing URLs.

Starting in the current version of Chrome (75), you’ll see a warning when the page URL might be confused for URLs of sites you’ve visited recently.

This new warning works by comparing the URL of the page you’re currently on to URLs of pages you’ve recently visited. If the URL looks similar, and might cause you to be confused or deceived, we’ll show a warning that helps you get back to safety.

We believe that you shouldn't have to be a security expert to feel safe on the web, and that many Chrome power-users share our mission to make the web more secure for everyone. We’ll continue improving Chrome Security to help make Chrome easy to use safely, and are looking forward to collaborating with the community to further that goal. Install the new extension and start helping protect web users!

Posted by Emily Schechter, Chrome Product Manager

Google

Labels: anti-deception , chrome , chrome security , extensions , safe browsing , suspicious site reporter extension

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