How to use Sandbox (Windows) with Internet Explorer 10?

Discussion in 'other software & services' started by zmechys, Jan 29, 2013.

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  1. zmechys

    zmechys Registered Member

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  2. shuverisan

    shuverisan Registered Member

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    This stuff is for developers, not end users. IE 10 and sandbox means Enhanced Protected Mode. It's enabled by default in IE Metro but not for Desktop. To do this you have to go into the Internet Options.

    See here.
    http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2012/03/14/enhanced-protected-mode.aspx
     
  3. zmechys

    zmechys Registered Member

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    Thank you.
    It means Sandbox with IE 10 is in name only. When is Microsoft going to get serious about sandbox IE?
    Is it about copyrights?
     
  4. shuverisan

    shuverisan Registered Member

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    Well, it's confusing that Microsoft makes up unintuitive names for many things they do which other companies generically refer to, but IE actually has very capable 'sandboxing'. A new thing for IE 10 is for web developers to work commands into sites for HTML5 to be specifically sandboxed by IE. That's what you linked to originally.

    IE's sandboxing isn't like sandboxing with Sandboxie or other methods of file system virtualization, Protected Mode in IE is process isolation. From IE 7 (actually, I think it really dates back to some beta version of IE6 but I'm not 100% there), IE runs the broker process, which is the main GUI window at med. integrity, and then each tab with all its content, including plugins, is a separate process running at low integrity. EPM and AppContainer build on that with forcing 64 bit operation for better protection provided by ASLR, and AppContainer removes all read/write access from tab processes.

    THe problem is now that with Enhanced Protected Mode, no plugins work with it yet except for the MS packaged version of Flash. Even that's limited to whitelisted sites but that's a Microsoft decision, not a limitation of EPM.

    Chrome's sandboxing is more thorough because it has low integrity processes for extensions, html and javascript renderers, the gpu acceleration. Only the broker and Native Client run at med. integrity but Native Client itself is an additional sandbox for untrusted plugins or other programs (Quake 2 lol) to run in. Safari sandboxing from OSX Lion and up works in much the same way (broker and content processes) as IE does and Firefox only isolates plugins individually from the browser but it's all running at med. integrity. Opera does the same as Firefox.

    It's not IE's sandboxing which isn't serious, it's (in IE 7-9) how MS tries to preserve compatibility with addons, plugins and IE Zones which is the problem. You don't have this in other browsers because Windows doesn't manage website access for Java in Firefox, for example. This compatibility stuff is gone in IE 10 because all plugins need to be rewritten but I don't know of any changes made to the Internet Explorer zone categories in Win8.
     
  5. m00nbl00d

    m00nbl00d Registered Member

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    I don't think Internet Explorer 6 ever had a sandbox, aka Protected Mode? But, I never followed IE development that much, so like you I'm not so sure about it.

    Anyway, Google Chrome broker process runs with a medium integrity level (Vista and above), while renderers run at untrusted integrity level.
     
  6. shuverisan

    shuverisan Registered Member

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    Yeah I can't find again what made me think IE6 had this. It seems that it started in 7 on Vista and the loosely coupled tabs started with IE8.
    http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2008/03/11/ie8-and-loosely-coupled-ie-lcie.aspx
    Dunno what I was thinking.

    But I just looked in Process Explorer and sure enough, Chrome's subprocesses are listed as untrusted. My mistake, they used to be only low integrity with the lockdown token restricting processes further from there.
     
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