Security/Safe Browsing

Note: The Safe Browsing feature in Firefox has been renamed to Phishing Protection, but it's still now as Safe Browsing internally.

Overview

Google Safe Browsing was an anti-phishing extension released by Google on labs.google.com in December 2005. Google has released this extension to the Mozilla Foundation under MPL 1.1/GPL 2.0/LGPL 2.1 in order that it might be used as part of Firefox if desired.

We've landed this change on the trunk as a global extension as of 7 March 2006. The next steps are to figure out whether this is something we want to use as the base for an anti-phishing feature in Firefox. Of course, whether it is enabled or even shipped is still a matter for discussion, as is the final form the extension might take, its UI, the way users opt-in, and the like.

You can read the discussion that lead up to to its integration in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=329292

Prefs

• browser.safebrowsing.debug: show extra information about list updates on the command line
• browser.safebrowsing.enabled: enable phishing protection
• browser.safebrowsing.gethashURL: server endpoint for completions of malware and phishing lists
• browser.safebrowsing.id: what SAFEBROWSING_ID in gethashURL and updateURL maps to
• browser.safebrowsing.malware.enabled: enable malware protection
• browser.safebrowsing.malware.reportURL: probably unused
• browser.safebrowsing.reportMalwareMistakeURL: destination for the "This isn't an attack site" button (after ignoring the interstitial warning)
• browser.safebrowsing.reportPhishMistakeURL: destination for the "This isn't a web forgery" button (after ignoring the interstitial warning)
• browser.safebrowsing.reportPhishURL: destination for the "Help | Report Web Forgery" menu item
• browser.safebrowsing.updateURL: server endpoint for malware and phishing list updates
• urlclassifier.disallow_completions: list of tables for which we never call gethash
• urlclassifier.gethashnoise: the number of fake entries to add to any gethash calls
• urlclassifier.malwareTable: list of tables to use when looking for malware (they need to be named *-malware-* or *-unwanted-*)
• urlclassifier.max-complete-age
• urlclassifier.phishTable: list of tables to use when looking for phishing (they need to be named *-phish-*)

Documentation

• Safe Browsing protocol v2.2
• Design Documentation
• Server Spec
• Client Spec

Engineering

Product/Component: Toolkit/Safe Browsing

• Tracking bug
• The Firefox implementation is split into two parts:
  • browser/components/safebrowsing/
  • toolkit/components/url-classifier/ (includes the list manager)
• Local store is in:
  • ~/.cache/mozilla/firefox/XXXX/safebrowsing/ on Linux
  • ~/Library/Caches/Firefox/Profiles/XXXX/safebrowsing/ on Mac
• itisatrap.org test pages
• Telemetry dashboard

QA

• Malware, phishing and unwanted software test pages
• Phishtank (real phishing sites)
• Google test pages
• Script to dump the contents of the local store

To turn on debugging output, export the following environment variable:

NSPR_LOG_MODULES="UrlClassifierDbService:5,nsChannelClassifier:5"