14 DAY TRIAL // A design document submitted to the Chromium developers for review, outlines plans to add a malware report option, that will help Google improve its Safe Browsing service.
At the moment, when users try to access a malicious URL listed in Google's Safe Browsing blacklist, the browser displays a warning page.
In addition, if users have opted to share "usage statistics and crash reports" during installation, the browser will send Google the referer header for that page.
This allows the Safe Browsing service to make connections between compromised websites and the final landing pages loading the attack code.
However, the company is interested in even more attack-related data and plans to ask users for it via a new opt-in report feature.
The option will be available on future re-designed Google Safe Browsing warning pages and will read something amongst the line of "Help Google find malware by sending information to Google when Chrome displays a malware warning, to help protect other users."
It's not clear if this will be a one-time-check kind of implementation or if the user can change their mind at any time and stop the reporting.
The collection of data begins as soon as the malicious page is accessed and includes URLs from the src of <script>, <iframe> and <embed> tags, as well any URLs that caused a redirection to them.
The request and response headers for all of these URLs and the IP addresses they resolve to, are also fetched.
"Once the data is collected, it will be stored in the memory of the current interstitial," the design document explains.
"When the interstitial goes away (either because the user clicked 'Go back' or 'Proceed' or has closed the tab or the browser), we’ll get a notification whether or not the user had the check box checked and thus opted-in to sending the report," it adds.
There shouldn't be any noticeable performance impact on the browsing experience, but for safety reasons limits will be imposed on the number of processed tags and URLs.
