Google refuses to fix Remote Code Execution Vulnerabilities in Chromium 59. Unpatched Electron & CEF Apps are Vulnerable!

[Potato*Salad]

It's fine, i use Opera.. superior browser.

[vanished]

Here's another question: these other apps that use the outdated version of chrome, they're pre-programmed to only connect to directly to their own services (slack, spotify, etc.).  Correct me if I'm wrong, but a remote code execution is only dangerous if you're going to a site that's going to use it on you (ie malicious, sketchy pages).  For this reason alone, wouldn't this be harmless?

[AlTech]

19 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Here's another question: these other apps that use the outdated version of chrome, they're pre-programmed to only connect to directly to their own services (slack, spotify, etc.).  Correct me if I'm wrong, but a remote code execution is only dangerous if you're going to a site that's going to use it on you (ie malicious, sketchy pages).  For this reason alone, wouldn't this be harmless?

Some Electron based apps are browsers. Discord has site embeds which could cause issues if an attacker decided to use the exploit on a site which is shared by people on Discord.

[vanished]

Just now, AluminiumTech said:

Some Electron based apps are browsers. Discord has site embeds which could cause issues if an attacker decided to use the exploit on a site which is shared by people on Discord.

Ah, true, good point.

[Misanthrope]

Not sure why this is going through everyone it seems: It's not just Chrome but anything that uses its framework. Implementing a framework patch is easy for devs, moving to a completely new version of the framework isn't. 

 

All this means is that people will have less confidence in Chromium and might move to other frameworks so it makes no sense that Google refuses to patch. 

 

In sort its the kind of thing Microsoft would do and at that point you might as well go with Microsoft and forget Google. This terrible optics for Google. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

How about another perspective: Is it the responsibility of the Linux maintainers to provide a patch for every distro using an older version of the kernel to fix a problem that was already fixed in a later version of the kernel?

[LAwLz]

2 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

Not sure why this is going through everyone it seems: It's not just Chrome but anything that uses its framework. Implementing a framework patch is easy for devs, moving to a completely new version of the framework isn't. 

Care to explain to me how upgrading from Chromium 59.X.XX1 to 59.X.XX2 is easier than upgrading from Chromium 59 to Chromium 60?

 

2 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

All this means is that people will have less confidence in Chromium and might move to other frameworks so it makes no sense that Google refuses to patch. 

Other frameworks such as...?

And yes it makes sense for Google to refuse to patch. They have already released a patch but some developers do not want to use the latest version all the time.

 

2 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

In sort its the kind of thing Microsoft would do and at that point you might as well go with Microsoft and forget Google. This terrible optics for Google. 

What alternative from Microsoft?

 

 

37 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

How about another perspective: Is it the responsibility of the Linux maintainers to provide a patch for every distro using an older version of the kernel to fix a problem that was already fixed in a later version of the kernel?

Or another analogy. Imagine if someone found a bug in Minecraft 1.11 that was fixed in Minecraft 1.12. Are you really going to flame Microsoft because they won't release a version of 1.11 which doesn't have that issue? They would just tell you to download version 1.12 if that bug bothered you.

They would not give two craps if you had your own policy of only installing each second update. Want the latest bug fixes? Then don't stick to an old version.

 

Again, it is different for OSes because those are massive updates in terms of time consumption, compatibility, cost and other factors. Updating your browser and updating your OS are not comparable.

[Sniperfox47]

4 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

All this means is that people will have less confidence in Chromium and might move to other frameworks so it makes no sense that Google refuses to patch.

As lawlz said:

2 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Other frameworks such as...?

but also, the framework at hand (Electron) isn't even Google's product so why would it matter to them? And none of their tracking stuff is embedded into Chromium so again, doesn't really matter if others use it or not.

 

4 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

In sort its the kind of thing Microsoft would do and at that point you might as well go with Microsoft and forget Google. This terrible optics for Google. 

Are you talking the massively outdated IE engine that's baked into Windows? Or the Edge engine for UWP apps baked into Windows 10?

 

Most of the programs that use Electron are cross platform, so please explain to me how anything that Microsoft offers is even close to comparable.

[Jito463]

22 hours ago, Potato*Salad said:

It's fine, i use Opera.. superior browser.

It used to be the superior browser, back on the Presto engine.  Now it's not much better than another Chrome clone.  Don't get me wrong, I still use it as my primary browser (mostly because Presto Opera doesn't work on a lot of sites anymore), but there's a lot of classic features that never got carried over, like scrolling through pages (tabs for the heathens) via the mouse wheel.  It's a good browser, but no longer the superior choice.

[Drak3]

21 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

Now it's not much better than another Chrome clone.

21 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

It's a good browser, but no longer the superior choice.

Taking that at point blank face value, you're contradicting yourself.

Please, elaborate how Opera can be, functionally speaking, a Chrome clone and a good browser simultaneously.

[vorticalbox]

18 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Or another analogy. Imagine if someone found a bug in Minecraft 1.11 that was fixed in Minecraft 1.12. Are you really going to flame Microsoft because they won't release a version of 1.11 which doesn't have that issue?

Thats is not really the same, as chromium is a framework. It would be like going.

Laravel 1.1 has a bug but 1.2 doesn't "updating" isn't really a solution. Same is python 2.7 is still used because you can't just update to a new framework and expect everything to work.

[Jito463]

19 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

Taking that at point blank face value, you're contradicting yourself.

Please, elaborate how Opera can be, functionally speaking, a Chrome clone and a good browser simultaneously.

I said not much better.  In other words, it's better (there's some functionality that Opera has added that is not in the base Chrome), but the differences aren't as impressive as it used to be when they had their own rendering engine.  When they switched to the Blink engine, everything that made Opera unique was stripped away and they started anew.

 

It took ~10 versions of the new Opera for them to add bookmarks back (their internal testing made them believe it wasn't necessary).  It's slowly getting some of the old functionality back, but much is still missing.

[Drak3]

Just now, Jito463 said:

I said not much better.

Being better than most Chromium based browsers, including Chrome itself, isn't much of an accomplishment.

[LAwLz]

22 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

Taking that at point blank face value, you're contradicting yourself.

Please, elaborate how Opera can be, functionally speaking, a Chrome clone and a good browser simultaneously.

Because Chrome is good?

Before you reply please note that "good" does not mean "flawless", nor "best".

 

19 minutes ago, vorticalbox said:

Thats is not really the same, as chromium is a framework. It would be like going.

Laravel 1.1 has a bug but 1.2 doesn't "updating" isn't really a solution. Same is python 2.7 is still used because you can't just update to a new framework and expect everything to work.

Except you know, Python has two branches because of compatibility reasons. Chromium does not need to keep separate branches in that way, and never has.

Porting something from Python 2.7 to 3.0 might require a complete rewrite of your script. Changing from Chromium 59 to Chromium 60 is a far easier thing to do. I can't say how much easier it is, but since Electron is already updating to new Chromium versions fairly frequently (according to them, usually just one or two weeks after each stable Chromium release) it can't be that big of a deal for them.

 

Do you expect Mozilla to release patches for version 55 as well when version 56 is already out? I get it if version 55 was the ESR version, but not if it's the regular Firefox version. Want the latest things? Run the latest version. That's how all but ESR browser releases are.

Chromium does not have an extended support release so I don't see why people expect them to patch deprecated versions.

[Drak3]

24 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Because Chrome is good?

Before you reply please note that "good" does not mean "flawless", nor "best".

 

Chrome is adequate. I couldn't qualify Chrome as being good unless I'm looking at a vacuum where only Chromium broswers exist.

 

And even then, it's a bit of a stretch.

[vorticalbox]

36 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Because Chrome is good?

Before you reply please note that "good" does not mean "flawless", nor "best".

 

Except you know, Python has two branches because of compatibility reasons. Chromium does not need to keep separate branches in that way, and never has.

Porting something from Python 2.7 to 3.0 might require a complete rewrite of your script. Changing from Chromium 59 to Chromium 60 is a far easier thing to do. I can't say how much easier it is, but since Electron is already updating to new Chromium versions fairly frequently (according to them, usually just one or two weeks after each stable Chromium release) it can't be that big of a deal for them.

 

Do you expect Mozilla to release patches for version 55 as well when version 56 is already out? I get it if version 55 was the ESR version, but not if it's the regular Firefox version. Want the latest things? Run the latest version. That's how all but ESR browser releases are.

Chromium does not have an extended support release so I don't see why people expect them to patch deprecated versions.

I'm actually on the side of Google here it was more pointing out that minecraft != chromium in terms of updates and usage. Minecraft has one use, playing minecraft

[LAwLz]

14 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

Chrome is adequate. I couldn't qualify Chrome as being good unless I'm looking at a vacuum where only Chromium broswers exist.

 

And even then, it's a bit of a stretch.

How is Chrome not good? It's fast, has great support for web standards, has a decent amount of features...

There is a reason why so many browsers are basically just Chrome(ium) with some extra things glued on or some slight tweaks.

 

5 minutes ago, vorticalbox said:

I'm actually on the side of Google here it was more pointing out that minecraft != chromium in terms of updates and usage. Minecraft has one use, playing minecraft

Correct me if I am wrong, but I am pretty sure Chromium only has one branch for their stable releases (not counting the nightly builds or more specialized builds) unlike for example Python which has two. At the end of the day, that means that when a new version is released the old one gets replaced. If you want to keep up to date in terms of features and security then you have to update when a new version is released. You can't be several versions on a version that has been replaced several times over and expect the same bug fixes as the new versions.

[Drak3]

4 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

How is Chrome not good? It's fast, has great support for web standards, has a decent amount of features...

There is a reason why so many browsers are basically just Chrome(ium) with some extra things glued on or some slight tweaks.

Chrome was fast at one point, but it really isn't anymore. Web standard support was a talking point early on, but now every non Chromium based alternative outside of IE and Edge do. And it doesn't really have many features that makes it any better than FF, Safari, pre Chromium Opera. It's a bigger resource hog than other browsers.

 

And to be quite frank, many browsers are repackaged Chromium because of how easy repackaging Chromium is.

 

Chrome and Chromium were good in the early days. Now, it's the worst browser family I've used.

[Dabombinable]

12 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

Chrome was fast at one point, but it really isn't anymore. Web standard support was a talking point early on, but now every non Chromium based alternative outside of IE and Edge do. And it doesn't really have many features that makes it any better than FF, Safari, pre Chromium Opera. It's a bigger resource hog than other browsers.

 

And to be quite frank, many browsers are repackaged Chromium because of how easy repackaging Chromium is.

 

Chrome and Chromium were good in the early days. Now, it's the worst browser family I've used.

Its easy to see how bloated browsers become when you compare early versions of Chrome on a 3.2GHz P4 HT to newer versions and see it slow right down. As for FF, version 2 loads pages far faster on 2x PIII 1GHz with 2GB SDRAM (even FB) than any of the newer versions.

[Drak3]

39 minutes ago, Dabombinable said:

Its easy to see how bloated browsers become when you compare early versions of Chrome on a 3.2GHz P4 HT to newer versions and see it slow right down. As for FF, version 2 loads pages far faster on 2x PIII 1GHz with 2GB SDRAM (even FB) than any of the newer versions.

Browsers need to be put on a diet.

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, Drak3 said:

Chrome was fast at one point, but it really isn't anymore.

It still is. If its not fast on your computer then it is probably because it has become bloated on your computer.

However, the tests run by Mozilla shows that it's still fast (as far as JS performance goes at least). Hell, even the Firefox Quantum video from Mozilla shows that Chrome beats it at some pages, and loses at some.

 

Do you have any evidence to back up your claim? My guess is that it's just "I think it's slow on my machine therefore it is shit" like 99% of all browser discussions.

 

1 hour ago, Drak3 said:

And to be quite frank, many browsers are repackaged Chromium because of how easy repackaging Chromium is.

Where did you get this inside knowledge from? To me it sounds like you're just pulling claims out of thin air.

I don't see how repackaging Chromium is any more difficult than repackaging Firefox.

[colonel_mortis]

Chromium doesn't appear to have an ESR version, which, given how widely it's used in frameworks like Electron, seems like a slightly strange decision. It seems quite reasonable to me that someone packaging a native program doesn't want to have to ensure that everything is still working every 6 weeks, when a new build of Chromium is released, since it's much more complicated to update a native app than it is to just roll out a change to your website. I think it would make sense for there to be an ESR for which fixes like this are backported, so your program is pretty much guaranteed to be unaffected by the update, making it much easier and faster to roll out the critical fixes to the users. They then only need to actually do a full update every 6 months/year/whatever when a new ESR comes out. This isn't even considering the work involved for Electron, who would potentially have to deal with changes to the low level API (I don't know what the Chromium policy in that respect is).

However, Chromium doesn't use an ESR cycle, and v59 was superseded in July, so while I absolutely agree that it would have been good for them to backport it, and not doing so is a bit of a punch in the face to the Electron devs, there really is no obligation for them to. I imagine the community will have backported the fix by now anyway, so it's probably not a huge deal in terms of your stuff being much more vulnerable than it would have been if Google had fixed it instead.

[LAwLz]

47 minutes ago, colonel_mortis said:

I imagine the community will have backported the fix by now anyway, so it's probably not a huge deal in terms of your stuff being much more vulnerable than it would have been if Google had fixed it instead.

It was fixed over a week ago.

[DeScruff]

Soooo rather then have apps update to Chromium 60 (Now Chromium 61) that already exists, Google should make a 59.5?
I fail to see the point... Chromium 60 was the patch. Cause if I recall Chromium version numbers never meant major updates anyways. I mean isn't that why we are on Chromium 61 even though its only 9 years old?

And if the point is that these apps update every 2 versions of Chromium because 'reasons' (which seems like a fairly arbitrary update schedule) wouldn't they skip "59.5" and go right to 60? - Or shouldn't they be updating to Chromium 61 by now?

[Vanderburg]

On 9/29/2017 at 8:29 AM, huilun02 said:

I'm a world reknowned soup kitchen connoisseur and every one I've been to had someone provide me with the untensils. But the last one I visited did not. The manager said they could not find someone for the job. I insisted that they would get someone to do it but the manager told me to go to the joint couple blocks down the street that didn't have this issue.

 

How is this acceptable? If people had to take untensils by themselves they might end up in a brawl. This is dangerous. This is a crime against humanity! Ima blog about how bad this soup kitchen is and I expect eveyone to take my side. 

This is a really dumb analogy. If anything, they aren't saying they are out of utensils, they're saying the forks they were handing out has a bent prong. Instead of bending that prong back for everyone, they are saying go up to the counter and get a new fork like everyone else.