“Chrome considered harmful” – the Law of Unintended Consequences – Naked Security

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“Chrome considered harmful” – the Law of Unintended Consequences – Naked Security


An excellent article appeared last week on the APNIC blog.

Researched and written by Matthew Thomas of Verisign, the article is entitled Chromium’s impact on root DNS traffic, and it has raised some important issues amongst the Chromium browser development community relating to a feature in the browser code that’s known as the Intranet Redirect Detector.

To explain.

APNIC is the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre, headquartered in Brisbane, Australia, one of five internet number registries around the world.

These Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) look after global IP number allocations, maintain definitive internet domain name databases for their regions, and generally concern themselves with the health of the global internet.

As you can imagine, anything that upsets the balance of the internet – from spamming and cybercrime to misconfigured servers and badly-behaved network software – is of great concern to the RIRs.

The root DNS servers form the heart of the global Domain Name System, which automatically converts human-friendly server names such as nakedsecurity.sophos.com into network numbers that computers can use to send and receive traffic, such as 192.0.66.200 (that was our IP number when I looked it up today, as shown below).

As you can imagine, any unnecessary load on the root DNS servers could slow down internet access for all of us, by stretching out the time taken convert names to numbers, something that our browsers need to do all the time as we click from link to link online.

Chromium, as you almost certainly know, is a Google open-source project that produces the software at the core of many contemporary browsers, notably Google’s own Chrome Browser, which accounts for the majority of web traffic these days on laptops and mobile phones alike.

Chromium is also used in many other browsers, including Vivaldi, Brave and – recently, at least – Microsoft Edge. (Of today’s mainstream browsers, only Safari and Firefox aren’t based on a Chromium core.)

As you can imagine, any problematic code in Chromium could have an enormous global effect due to the prevalence of Chromium-based browsers in modern internet usage.

And last, but not least, the Intranet Redirect Detector is a “feature” added to the Chromium browser that is supposed to detect, and work around, a deceptive practice known as NXDOMAIN redirection (or, pejoratively, as NXDOMAIN hijacking) that is still used by some ISPs in some countries.