SECURITY ANALYSIS ON BROWSERS

Abstract

The evolution of the digital world brings up one constantly changing variable called cyber threat. The casual user must be aware of what possibly can get wrong while interacting in the cyber space. In best case scenario the user should follow the trends for being up-to-date with all present vulnerabilities. Most of the users are just users which makes them easy being attacked. Their lack of information or too professionally explained information on the attacks makes them refuse diving in more investigations. Which makes them incompetent to fight against possible attacks or at least dealing with the consequences.

The article is going to make a security analysis on the most used application interface that provides access to the cyber space: browsers. Browsers have grown in breadth and depth creating a complex architecture with many components which at some point as every software development comes up with errors. Those flaws allow the attackers to overcome all kind of security policies harming different endpoints: from hardware to software, into data. And in every case the losses of the end user are very serious.

In preparation of the article, the reported data covers the period from around 1989 until the first half of 2021 by illustrating the results into graphics. The data is collected through reports from the most popular worldwide insights like CVE and CVSS.

The most detailed analyses are on browsers like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari as part of the research defines them as the most popular. In some points some of the other popular browsers are also reviewed but as the description of each of them is saying most of them are based on the three mentioned above.

In the recent years, browsers have integrated certain security header controls to support the web application security. Those headers leads the browser on how to behave when handling sensitive content and data of the application. Enabled in the application, browsers will prevent attacks automatically. But not all browsers support them! In previous research, the scope of the already available HTTP headers was fully described by definition and use. Therefore, this article will add some compatibility issues analysis.

Unfortunately, every day a new threat is coming up but being up-to-date with the latest updates always brings another level of security into the user’s daily cyber activities. And as browsers are being the tool for accessing the cyber world, the goal of this article is to help choosing the right as part of the user secure browsing.