Comment by teruakohatu
2 years ago
Can someone explain to me why we can load vast quantities of untrusted code and a wide variety of image formats in our browsers all day long and be mostly safe today, but somehow even first party messenger apps seem to be a relatively easily compromised? Why can't messenger apps be sandboxed as well as browsers?
Sending these through messaging apps is appealing because that usually requires zero user action - you just send a message and the device runs the exploit as it generates preview thumbnails.
But browser exploits require the user to visit an infected website, which is much tougher. If I recieve an email or sms with "visit applesupport.info" I'm not going to click it.
Note that the second half of this exploit chain involves going around and exploiting the web browser.
this exploit chain involved a browser vulnerability; your premise is flawed
It's all relative. Chrome has plenty of sandbox escapes. Microsoft found one lately where Chrome was passing strings from JS straight into the Windows TTS engine, which turned out to be parsing XML from it with a C++ parser that was full of memory errors.