On April the 7th at 22:53, Aaron wrote:

I just read a Digital Trends article that states NoScript is a security breach. What's the story here???

It's a story of FUD and sensationalism, which got reported in such a careless way that now makes explaining and correcting readers' perception an uphill battle.

They've just demonstrated that rather than invoking a low-level function directly, like any installed add-on could do anyway, a malicious Firefox extension that has already been approved by an AMO code reviewer and manually installed by the user can invoke another add-on that the same user had previously installed and perform the low-level tasks on its behalf, not in order to gain any further privilege but just for obfuscation purposes.

It's like saying that you need to uninstall Microsoft Office immediately because tomorrow you may also install a virus that then can use Word's automation interface to replicate itself, rather than invoking the OS input/output functions directly. Or that, for the same reasons, you must uninstall any Mac OS application which exposes an AppleScript interface.

BTW, if you accept this as an Office or AppleScript vulnerability, Adblock Plus is not less "vulnerable", so to speak, than the other mentioned add-ons, despite what the article states. It's just that those "researchers" were not competent enough to understand how to "exploit" it.

And I'm a bit disappointed of Nick Nguyen who, rather than putting some effort in rebutting this cheap "research", chose the easier path of pitching our new WebExtensions API, whose better insulation and permissions system actually makes this specific scenario less likely and deserves to be praised anyway, but does not and could not prevent the almost infinite other ways to obfuscate malicious intent available to any kind of non-trivial program, be it a Chrome extension, an iOS app or a shell script. Only the trained eye of a code reviewer can mitigate this risk, and even if there's always room for improvement, this is what makes AMO stand out among the crowd of so called "market places".