In our earliest discussions about the extension system, we knew we wanted to raise the bar for security, but how can we secure the platform while still letting developers create awesome extensions that have rich interactions with web pages? During our threat analysis, we realized there were two main security concerns: malicious extensions and "benign-but-buggy" extensions.
A malicious extension is an extension written by an ill-intentioned developer. For example, a malicious extension might record your passwords and send them to back to a central server. The tricky part about defending against malicious extensions is that there are . Our defenses against malicious extensions focus on helping the user avoid installing malicious extensions in the first place:
- We expect most users to install extensions from , where each extension has a reputation. We expect malicious extensions will have a low reputation and will have difficulty attracting many users. If a malicious extension is discovered in the gallery, we will remove it from the gallery.
