Foreign media Bleeping Computer reported that Google Chrome browser developers recently solved a security issue, partitioning the browser cache by website instead of a single unified heap.
Google Chrome engineers Josh Karlin and Shivani Sharma explain the problem with unified caching.
“This opens the door to side-channel attacks for browsers, where one website can detect if another website has a resource loaded by checking if the resource is in the cache. It sounds harmless, but it can be used to do a lot Evil deeds, like discovering what’s in your inbox, contacts, etc.”
Since Chrome 85, the browser has been creating a cache of specific websites that other websites cannot interact with. Unfortunately, this comes with a performance hit.
“Early (Canary/dev) results using top-frame-site showed that the impact was not as severe as feared. The cache hit rate dropped by about 4%, but the change to the first rich paint was statistically Not significant, and the overall score for bytes loaded from cache only dropped from 39.1% to 37.8%.” The Google engineer said, “This may change as we move towards beta and stable, but This seems to be an encouraging start.”
IT House has learned that Google is looking to alleviate this situation by expanding the size of the cache for specific sites.
“Now that the cache will be partitioned, it makes sense to see if increasing the cache size helps offset some of the performance hit by reducing the eviction rate,” Sharma said in a Chrome Gerrit post.
Google is planning experiments with Canary, Beta and Dev build users to expand the browser opportunity for specific sites to between 2 and 3 times the usual size. This should increase cache hit ratios and improve load times.
The test has not yet been approved, but should be rolled out to testers soon.
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