Spook.js: Attacking Chrome Strict Site Isolation via Speculative Execution

The discovery of the Spectre attack in 2018 has sent shockwaves through the computer industry, affecting processor vendors, OS providers, programming language developers, and more. Because web browsers execute untrusted code while potentially accessing sensitive information, they were considered prime targets for attacks and underwent significant changes to protect users from speculative execution attacks. In particular, the Google Chrome browser adopted the strict site isolation policy that prevents leakage by ensuring that content from different domains is not shared in the same address space. The perceived level of risk that Spectre poses to web browsers stands in stark contrast with the paucity of published demonstrations of the attack. Before mid-March 2021, there was no public proof-of-concept demonstrating leakage of information that is otherwise inaccessible to an attacker. Moreover, Google’s leaky.page, the only current proof-of-concept that can read such information, is severely restricted to only a subset of the address space and does not perform cross-website accesses. In this paper, we demonstrate that the absence of published attacks does not indicate that the risk is mitigated. We present Spook.js, a JavaScript-based Spectre attack that can read from the entire address space of the attacking webpage. We further investigate the implementation of strict site isolation in Chrome, and demonstrate limitations that allow Spook.js to read sensitive information from other webpages. We further show that Spectre adversely affects the security model of extensions in Chrome, demonstrating leaks of usernames and passwords from the LastPass password manager. Finally, we show that the problem also affects other Chromium-based browsers, such as Microsoft Edge and Brave.