Did you know nomination[edit]

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by AirshipJungleman29 talk 01:30, 31 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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Created by Sohom Datta (talk). Self-nominated at 19:43, 30 December 2023 (UTC). Post-promotion hook changes for this nom will be logged at Template talk:Did you know nominations/Site isolation; consider watching this nomination, if it is successful, until the hook appears on the Main Page.[reply]

What do you think of this: ALT3: ... that adding the browser security feature site isolation made Google Chrome use 10% more RAM? toobigtokale (talk) 03:36, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
ALT3 Seems good to me :) Sohom (talk) 06:36, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Approved for ALT3. toobigtokale (talk) 11:07, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Jargon[edit]

This article can greatly benefit from defining what it means by 'site', 'cross-origin site' (the latter probably should be changed to something like 'cross-origin web page', as it doesn't refer to site in the sense of origin) and 'instance' (which refers to a renderer instance like a tab or window and not a browser instance). See also https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/site-isolation/ --PaulT2022 (talk) 22:54, 3 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Also, The singular rendering process would engage with other privileged services when necessary to execute elevated actions when viewing a web page. is incorrect per the Chromium link above ('Chrome made an effort to place pages from different web sites in different renderer processes when possible') and the 2013 paper referenced in the article (see table on p.80). It should be something like 'singular per rendered web page'. PaulT2022 (talk) 00:23, 4 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@PaulT2022 If you take a look at "Project progression" of the same link it mentions that the vast majority of traditional navigations (link-clicks, every other interaction) would lead to the renderer process being shared between origins. While the mechanism to seperate sites did exist, it wasn't used very much/at all, site isolation forced the architecture to be process per renderer by default.
Regarding the confusion wrt to 'site', the Chrom(e|ium) definition refers to eTLD+1 seperation, whereas Reis 2009 and Firefox use the complete origin as a site identifier. I do agree that the article is lacking some nuance in that aarea, and I'll see how I can add it without adding more jargon (which is hard) :) Sohom (talk) 08:26, 4 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
it wasn't used very much/at all, site isolation forced the architecture to be process per renderer by default – I don't believe this was the case. Chromium used isolated renderer processes for each website from the beginning ("it swapped renderer processes for cross-site navigations that were initiated in the browser process (such as omnibox navigations or bookmarks)"). According to the 2013 paper, other browsers were too by 2013. The issue was that iframes embedded in the page were rendered by the same process, and the process was re-used when navigating to another site, which resulted in scripts potentially having access to the same memory that was used to render a page from another origin previously. PaulT2022 (talk) 14:31, 4 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@PaulT2022 I agree with what you are saying, I'm not disputing that new renderers were created for bookmark and omnibox navigations. However, that does not account for a vast majority of navigations on the web (how many times do you search a specific thing in a new tab (creates a new process) vs click on a link (reuses renderer processes)). Using the process-per-rendering-instance model for 2% of navigations and process-per-browsing-instance model for the rest, does not change the fact that the predominant model is still process-per-browsing-instance. Sohom (talk) 16:05, 4 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with this (although not quantitatively with 2%, as it's a new process for each address bar navigation/search as well).
All I'm saying is that it isn't evident from the text, especially to someone not familiar with the background, that 'singular' means process-per-browsing-instance. PaulT2022 (talk) 16:16, 4 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

GA Review[edit]

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Reviewing
This review is transcluded from Talk:Site isolation/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: RoySmith (talk · contribs) 17:04, 4 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Sohom Datta: starting review. RoySmith (talk) 17:04, 4 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

 Done
I've tried simplifying this
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The part after the comma briefly explains what a web-principal is.
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That would have been Microsoft Reasearch, but you are right, that line isn't the best, I've tried to reword that part.

OK, that's it for a first reading. Overall, this is looking pretty good. I still need to come back for another read after you've addressed the issues I've noted above, plus copyright checks and reference spot-checks. I may not get back to that for a few days. RoySmith (talk) 18:02, 4 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, one other thing; while not strictly required, it would be helpful if this could be illustrated with some block diagrams of how the various browser components interact with each other and how they are distributed among processes in the various architectures. Also, different operating systems have somewhat different concepts of what a process is. If you could find anything which talks about how those differences affect implementations of site isolation on different platforms, that would be useful. RoySmith (talk) 18:09, 4 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I've added a diagram. I wasn't able to find much discussion about the comparism between different process implementations :( Sohom (talk) 03:29, 8 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Source spotcheck: 2, 5, 6, 12, 17 vs Special:Permalink/1211912654

I've added some new sources that mention both Spectre and Meltdown and specified which pages I am citing.
Ref 2 provides a break down of each of the research browser's methodologies. While it is not strictly required, it would be useful to a more technical reader who might want to dig deeper.
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As far as copyright problems go, a scan with Earwig turned up nothing of concern. RoySmith (talk) 20:00, 5 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

RoySmith (talk) 19:58, 5 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Sohom Datta I've placed this on hold. Please address the above issues in the next 7 days, thanks. RoySmith (talk) 18:37, 7 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@RoySmith I've addressed your points above. Let me know if there are any more concerns/issues :) Sohom (talk) 15:31, 8 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Looks good, thanks. Nice article. It's amazing how sophisticated some of these attacks are. RoySmith (talk) 15:47, 8 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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