Mozilla Provides Firefox 95 New Security Features With Sandboxing Technology

The latest version of Mozilla's browser, Firefox 95, has officially started. (photo: Doc. Mozilla)

JAKARTA - The latest version of Mozilla's browser, Firefox 95, is officially out today, bringing with it security features designed to limit the damage caused by bugs and security vulnerabilities in its code.

The feature, dubbed RLBox, was developed by researchers at the University of California San Diego and the University of Texas. Initially, this feature was released as a prototype last year.

Furthermore, the RLBox feature is a sandboxing technology, which means it is able to isolate code effectively so that any security vulnerabilities it may contain cannot harm the system as a whole.

Sandboxing itself is a security method widely used throughout the industry, and Firefox 95 already runs web content in a sandboxing process to try to stop malicious or buggy sites from interfering with the overall work of the browser.

The RLBox feature makes it possible to sand critical browser subcomponents such as its spell checker, effectively treating it as untrusted code while still running in the same process. This limits how code can be run or which memory it can access.

Firefox has isolated five modules, such as the Graphite font rendering engine, Hunspell spell checker, Ogg multimedia container format, Expat XML parser, and Woff2 web font compression format.

Mozilla says if bugs or vulnerabilities are found in any of these subcomponents, the Firefox team shouldn't scramble to stop them from harming the rest of the browser.

Additionally, Mozilla acknowledges that this is not a comprehensive solution and will not work everywhere, as with performance-sensitive browser components.

But the developers say they hope to see other browsers and software projects implement similar technology and intend to use it with more Firefox components in the future. Mozilla has also updated its bug bounty program and will now pay researchers if they can get past the new sandboxing.