Microsoft’s BrowserShield
EWeek is reporting today about the BrowserShield project, a new software experiment from Microsoft Research that the company hopes will let Internet Explorer 7 users browse the web more safely.
BrowserShield acts as a "safety net," detecting malicious scripts on web pages and intercepting them before they can be run in the browser. The software will clean the scripts from the actual code, forcing a script-free (and hopefully harmless) page to load instead.
It's in Microsoft's best interest to speed up the security fix process. When a new worm hits the web, only informed users with the latest detection tools will download a browser patch right away. Most users will continue surfing — and remain vulnerable to the latest threat — for a day or a week. According to Microsoft's Helen Wang, who was interviewed for the article, the BrowserShield project was created to protect users from such "zero-day exploits."
The framework also has built-in controls that help make Ajax forms more secure, though the eWeek article doesn't go into any detail about how that's done.
