Google Safe Browsing

From Infogalactic: the planetary knowledge core
Jump to: navigation, search

Google Safe Browsing is a blacklist service provided by Google that provides lists of URLs for web resources that contain malware or phishing content.[1][2] The Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox web browsers use the lists from the Google Safe Browsing service for checking pages against potential threats.[3][4] Google also provides a public API for the service.[5]

Google also provides information to Internet service providers, by sending e-mail alerts to autonomous system operators regarding threats hosted on their networks.[2]

According to Google, as of June 2012, some 600 million Internet users were using this service, either directly or indirectly.[6]

Privacy

Google maintains the Safe Browsing Lookup API, which has a privacy drawback: "The URLs to be looked up are not hashed so the server knows which URLs the API users have looked up". The Safe Browsing API v3, on the other hand, compares 32-bit hash prefixes of the URL to preserve privacy.[7][8] The Firefox and Safari browsers use the latter.[9]

Safe Browsing also stores a mandatory preferences cookie on the computer[10] which the US National Security Agency allegedly uses to identify individual computers for purposes of exploitation.[11]

Google Safe Browsing "conducts client-side checks. If a website looks suspicious, it sends a subset of likely phishing and social engineering terms found on the page to Google to obtain additional information available from Google's servers on whether the website should be considered malicious". Logs, "including an IP address and one or more cookies" are kept for two weeks. They are "tied to the other Safe Browsing requests made from the same device."[12]

See also

References

  1. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. 2.0 2.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  5. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  6. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  8. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  9. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  10. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  11. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  12. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

External links