Mozilla is unveiling a new security feature that it believes will make Firefox the most secure consumer browser available. It’s called RLBox, and it’s available in today’s Firefox 95 version. It’s a new sandboxing tool created by the company in partnership with the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Texas.
Sandboxing is used by all current browsers to safeguard users from malicious code. The issue is that many of the more sophisticated exploits combine two flaws to bypass those defenses. RLBox compiles a process into WebAssembly and then converts it to native code. This strategy, according to Mozilla, has two major advantages. It stops code from hopping between sections of a program and restricts access to certain locations of your system’s memory.
Mozilla will employ RLBox to isolate five components of Firefox, including the browser’s Graphite font rendering engine and Ogg multimedia module. If the system works as planned, Mozilla claims that “even a zero-day vulnerability in any of [the five components] should pose no threat to Firefox.”
Mozilla is eager to point out that RLBox will not be able to safeguard every component of Firefox. It is, for example, unsuitable for modules that rely on sharing memory with the rest of the application to work. However, Mozilla is optimistic that other developers would utilize the technology to make their applications safer. RLBox is now available in both desktop and mobile versions of Firefox.
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