Few desktop and mobile applications are as heavily used as web browsers, yet browsers also introduce a slew of potential security exposures, no matter how carefully they're locked down. Large organizations have relied on so-called “browser isolation” services to deal with this risk for years, but these tools are often slow and clunky. As a result, many companies only require them for the most sensitive work; otherwise, employees would search for workarounds. On Tuesday, the internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare is debuting its own version—a service aptly named Browser Isolation—that the company says is just as fast, and sometimes faster, than browsing without the protection.
Browsers, by definition, are an open door. Their job is to receive data from web servers and send back information. This means, though, that in addition to legitimate, benign web data, users can end up downloading malware or malicious attachments through a browser. And hackers can also find vulnerabilities in a browser's own code and exploit them to attack targets.
“The browser is the stuff of nightmares for chief information security officers,” says Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince. “Inherently, every time it runs, the browser is downloading completely foreign code and running it on the device. Browsers do a good job of sandboxing and controlling the risk that’s there, but on an almost weekly basis you’re going to see some sort of vulnerability in one of the major browsers that's allowing people to potentially break out of that sandbox.”
Browser isolation services like Cloudflare's, which has been in beta testing since October, protect computers by running the browser in a controlled container away from your other services and dat ..
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