The latest version of Mozilla's popular Firefox browser has gotten a security makeover. Mozilla recently announced the addition of a sandboxing technology known as RLBox to its newest release in hopes of making it the most secure browser available to consumers.
To protect against malicious code, most modern browsers use sandboxing techniques where an isolated environment is created to test out new code, potentially malicious websites, and their behavior patterns.
What makes Mozilla's RLBox technology so distinctive? And how is Firefox 95 more secure than its former versions? Let's find out.
What Makes Firefox 95's RLBox Technology Outstanding?
The RLBox sandboxing technology, which is available through the new Firefox 95 update, was developed by Mozilla in collaboration with the University of California San Diego and the University of Texas.
While most modern browsers already use sandboxing, it is not always very effective. Threat actors can generally string together two vulnerabilities to bypass the sandboxing protection easily. For example, they might use one vulnerability to compromise a sandboxed process and another to break free from the sandbox.
To address this issue, RLBox uses WebAssembly, a new type of code that developers can run in most modern web browsers.
According to Mozilla, "RLBox is a big win for us on several fronts: it protects our users from accidental defects as well as supply-chain attacks, and it reduces the need for us to scramble when such issues are disclosed upstream."
More Secure Than Previous Versions of Firefox
Firefox 95 uses RLBox sandboxing to position the code into WebAssembly rather than a separate process. It is an intricate process that protects the system at multiple layers.
Firstly, it compiles a process into WebAssembly, converts that process, and then re-converts it into native code. This is done to prevent the code from traveling between different sections of a program. This also limits access to only certain areas of system memory.
According to The Verge, Mozilla is isolating five modules known as Graphite (font rendering engine), Hunspell (spell checker), Ogg (multimedia module), Expat (XML parser), and Woff2 (web font compression format). Also, if the system works as expected, the crowning stroke of this new release will be that even a zero-day vulnerability will not be able to penetrate these components.
Needles to say, this integration with RLBox sandboxing certainly makes Firefox 95 much more secure than its predecessors.
Don't Wait; Upgrade to Firefox 95 Today
Are you excited to upgrade to Firefox 95? As an end-user, you don't have to install, configure, or do anything special to enable the RLBox feature.
Along with enhanced security, the updated Firefox also offers a few other features, such as reduced power consumption of decoded video on macOS, especially while using the full-screen mode. Users can also move the Picture-in-Picture toggle button to the opposite side of the video now.
If you care about browser security and exclusive features, then upgrading to Firefox 95 will be the next best step you will take.