Can you get virus just by visiting a website in Chrome?

Question

I've recently read Google Chrome: The End of Drive-By Downloads. Is it true to say that drive-by-downloads are history in Google Chrome?

So if I have a link (from a spam email) I can right-click >> open in new incognito window >> and be 100% sure that there is no virus / damage to my system?

Initially i've asked this question at https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/15209/anonymous-links-in-email/15211 but I'm not getting a good answer (and besides the answers are all targeted at phishing-sites whereas my question is targeted at "virus-sites").

Answer 1

It is admitted that drive-by download attacks occur only thanks to the user's interaction as it was the case, for instance, with the HDD Plus virus where visitors of the compromised website needed to double click at least on rad.msn.com banners.

But actually there have been drive-by download attacks that run successfully on IE, Safari, Chrome and Firefox without requiring the user's interaction. For instance, CVE-2011-0611 was a 0-day vulnerability up to April 13th, 2011 (meaning a short while before you asked this question). It was used to infect the homepage of the Human Right Watch website in UK. The infected page contains a rogue <script src=newsvine.jp2></script> element. This tricks the browser into caching and executing newsvine.jp2 as JavaScript code. It was a drive-by cache attack which is just a case of drive-by download attacks. The caching is successful, but the file cannot be executed as JavaScript because it is actually a renamed malicious executable corresponding to a backdoor from the pincav family.

Another rogue script element found on the infected page is <script src="/includes/googlead.js"></script>, which unlike most drive-by download attacks, loads a local .js file. The JavaScript code in googlead.js creates an iframe that executes the SWF exploit from a domain controlled by the attackers.

By the same year you asked this question, there was an other example of a drive-by download attack of which no browser was safe as long as they run a vulnerable version of JRE at that time (CVE-2011-3544). Thousands of visitors of the Amnesty International's homepage in UK were thus infected by Trojan Spy-XR malware. The attacks continued until June 2011, so later after you asked this question: Google Chrome was not safe of it.

A little bit more than two years later after this question, on October 24th, 2013, the famous php.net website has been infecting its visitors by a drive-download attack through a hidden iframe tag. The attack concerned also Google Chrome.

Also you mentioned Google Chrome could be that safe because of its sandbox mechanism: well, all browsers are sandboxed, not only Google Chrome, but still they are vulnerable to drive by download attacks because of their own vulnerabilities or those of the plugins installed within them.

Answer 2

Short answer: Yes, you can get a virus just by visiting a site in Chrome or any other browser, with no user-interaction needed (video demonstration). Even with Chrome you are not 100% secure - and you probably never will be with any browser, but Chrome is getting pretty close to it and the security research community seems to agree that at this time, it is the most secure browser you can use.

Long answer: Chrome, at this time, is the most secure browser that exists in windows, because of the sandboxing techniques it uses which add up to the security. A good description of this sandbox is here: http://blog.chromium.org/2008/10/new-approach-to-browser-security-google.html although a bit dated. A more recent and technical one is here: http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/sandbox

The general idea is that a malicious website will have to use two separate exploits to achieve code execution on your pc: The first one exploiting the browser, the second exploiting the sanbox. This has been proven a very hard thing to do - it has not be done ever.

Your question comes at a nice timing: A week ago the security research firm VUPEN claimed that it broke chrome sandbox and published the following announcement: http://www.vupen.com/demos/VUPEN_Pwning_Chrome.php If you watch the video, you will see that no user interaction was necessary besides visiting the malicious URL, and a sample application popped up out of nowhere (it could be virus instead). The attack description proved to be wrong (but that does not matter much to simple users): The sandbox itself was not breached. It turned out that VUPEN exploited a bug in Adobe Flash Player, which is a plugin almost everybody has installed - and this plugin was not sandboxed. The answer of Google is that they are moving and developing fast so that this plugin will be sandboxed eventually in the next versions.

To sum it up: As you could see in the video, you can never be 100% sure that you are safe, so be careful, don't open links you don't know where they go or don't trust the sites.

Sidenote: NSA recently published a document indicating "Best Practices" for user security on the internet: Among those is the recommendation to use a browser that has a sandbox.

Here is the report: http://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/factsheets/Best_Practices_Datasheets.pdf

Another sidenote: Internet Explorer 9 is advertised as having a sandbox, but security researchers agree that it is not properly implemented and have demonstrated successful attacks against it.

And a third one: The incognito window has nothing to do with virus protection, but can be useful in certain classes of attacks where cookie stealing or similar is the target because it separates browser instances and isolates information available.

Finally, there are technologies that offer better protection, like sandboxie and running browsers in virtual machines.

Answer 3

I don't think we can say drive-by downloads are history (if you're using Chrome). Chrome does implement sand boxing but it's not impossible to escape the contained process space. The sand boxing and safe browsing only decrease the likelihood of attacker being successful.