Google just released a new security feature on Wednesday called site isolation which helps blocks attackers from using vulnerabilities in websites to steal sensitive data. According to the Chrome Team, “Speculative execution side-channel attacks like Spectre are a newly discovered security risk for web browsers. A website could use such attacks to steal data or login information from other websites that are open in the browser.” This includes other tabs that you may have open, like your online banking or payroll portal. Chrome’s site isolation feature makes sure that each website is rendered (actually created on your screen using the HTML, CSS, and Javascript code from the website’s webserver) in their own process. This isolation means that data from one site is not in the same process thread as the other, thus preventing data theft.
The really cool part is that this isolation technology will even render embedded iframes in their own process. This means that if you visit a webpage that pretends to be your bank or some other important website (phishing attack), but embeds the actual login page for your bank in an effort to steal your login information, your information will still be safe when using chrome. The trade off, however is that these separated rendering processes will consume 10-13% more memory (RAM) on average so you might want to rethink having a bunch of tabs open if you can help it.
Here you can read the entire Chrome Team Blog post
