Future Firefox Releases To Include Sandboxing And More

If you are wondering what Mozilla has been up to recently, then this article is a good starting point.

According to Johnathan Nightingale, Mozilla’s Director of Firefox Engineering, the company has been quite busy at brainstorming and implementing new ideas to improve Firefox’s security,

First in the list is the JIT (just in time) compiler hardening, which should protect users against JIT spraying attacks.

“The reality is that the way our JIT engine is built makes it somewhat resilient to JIT Spraying attacks,” Johnathan said. “But there is still work we can do on that class of vulnerability to just get it out of the realm of even the theoretical — and that work is ongoing.”

In addition to that, it looks like Mozilla is looking at the Google’s Chrome sandboxing feature, which significantly browser’s security. However, the mentioned term usage has been somewhat vague and with no mention in implementation date,

“Sandboxing has some real benefits, but it’s not a silver bullet, it is something that our platform team is looking at really closely.”

As far as updates go, Nightingale has stated that Mozilla will be improving the way Firefox handles security updates, which should require little to no interaction from the end user aka Silent Updates, which we detailed sometime last year.

So here you have it folks and in case you are wondering about the release date of Firefox 10, which will not include the mentioned features, it’s January 31st.

[Thanks, Ichan]

[Via: eSecurityPlanet]