News

Google Fixes Bugs in Chrome Frame Affecting IE 8

• By Kurt Mackie
• 11/20/2009

Google has fixed bugs in Google Chrome Frame, including one that Microsoft called out as a security problem.

Chrome Frame is designed to let Web developers use HTML5 features that Google claims are not supported in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 browser. When Chrome Frame was announced in September, Microsoft quickly noted that it posed security problems.

On Wednesday, Google issued a bug fix announcement indicating that a patch would automatically update Chrome Frame. The patch solves an issue where IE 8 freezes intermittently. It also includes a security fix for a "cross-origin bypass" vulnerability. Apparently, this is the security issue pointed out by Microsoft and others.

Google indicated in its announcement that this vulnerability was of high severity and important to patch.

"An attacker could have bypassed cross-origin protections," Google wrote. "Although important, 'High' severity issues do not permit persistent malware to infect a user's machine. We're unaware of any exploitation of this issue."

Google credited "Billy Rios and Microsoft Vulnerability Research (MSVR) and also to Lostmon for finding and reporting this vulnerability responsibly."

To make Chrome Frame work, Web developers place a snippet of code in their Web page. The code switches IE's Trident layout engine to the open source WebKit one used in the Google Chrome browser. According to Google, this technology allows IE 8 to access HTML5 and JavaScript improvements that currently aren't supported in Microsoft's browser.