Microsoft Gazelle: Research to Make the Most Secure Web Browser of the World

As Firefox, Google Chrome etc are coming up with hot and new developments every month to uniquely establish themselves in the browsers’ war, Microsoft isn’t quiet either. Microsoft Research is developing a new browser called Microsoft’s Gazelle and they released a PDF paper last week. Microsoft claims Gazelle is more of an web operating system working as a browser and it will give you more security that any of its competitors in the market.

The high security is achieved because Gazelle handles each element in separate process. And this is the principal on which Gazelle architecture is designed. Elements mean iframes, plugins and subframes etc. Current major browsers cannot enforce any security on plugins because plugins are allowed to interact with the local operating system directly. But Gazelle will not it happen at all. Gazelle’s security origin mainly relies on three different points.

• Cross- Origin Vulnerability
• Display Vulnerability
• Plugin Vulnerability

Difference with Google Chrome

The principal instance is similar to Google Chrome’s  site instance, but with two crucial differences:

• Google Chrome considers the sites that share the same  registrar-controlled domain name to be from the same site, so ad.datacenter.com, user.datacenter.com, and datacenter.com are considered to be the same site and belong to the same principal.
  In contrast,  Gazelle considers them as separate principals.
• When a site, say a.com, embeds another principal’s content, say an iframe with source b.com, Google Chrome puts them into the same site instance.
  In contrast, Microsoft Gazelle puts them into separate principal instances.

The most important part is, IE team is not associated with it so you can forget about the bugs of IE for a moment now. May be with the success of Gazelle (if at all), we will get to see the a next version of Internet Explorer of that type.

With so much of security that Microsoft proposes (Strange na?), I wonder how resource hungry and fast it will be.