The rapid proliferation of AI and GenAI tools has extended to the Chrome Web Store. Cybercriminals are exploiting this trend, deploying malicious Chrome extensions posing as AI tools or impersonating popular GenAI models to target users. These extensions often appear legitimate while secretly exfiltrating sensitive data or redirecting users web traffic to attacker-controlled domains. To examine the impact of this trend on the browser extension ecosystem, we curated a dataset of 5,551 AI-themed extensions released over a nine-month period to the Chrome Web Store. Using a multi-signal detection methodology that combines manifest analysis, domain reputation, and runtime network behavior, supplemented with human review, we identified 154 previously undetected malicious Chrome extensions. Together with extensions known from public threat research disclosures, this resulted in a final set of 341 malicious extensions for analysis. Of these, 29 were GenAI-related, forming the focus of our in-depth analysis and disclosure. We deconstruct representative GenAI cases, including Supersonic AI, DeepSeek AI | Free AI Assistant, and Perplexity Search, to illustrate attacker techniques such as Adve
This Article examines Google's dominance of the browser market, highlighting how Google's Chrome browser plays a critical role in reinforcing Google's dominance in other markets. While Google portrays Chrome as a neutral platform built on open-source technologies, this Article shows that Chrome is instrumental in Google's strategy to reinforce its dominance in the online advertising, publishing, and browser markets. The examination of Google's strategic acquisitions, anticompetitive practices, and implementation of so-called "privacy controls" underlines that Chrome is far from a neutral gateway to the web. Rather, it serves as a key tool for Google to maintain and extend its market power, often to the detriment of competition and innovation in the digital economy. This Article illustrates how Chrome not only bolsters Google's position in online advertising and publishing through practices such as coercion and self-preferencing, but also leverages its advertising clout to engage in a "pay-to-play" paradigm--the cornerstone of Google's larger strategy of market control. It also outlines potential regulatory interventions and remedies by drawing on historical antitrust precedents. La
We introduce a simple yet effective technique for estimating lighting from a single low-dynamic-range (LDR) image by reframing the task as a chrome ball inpainting problem. This approach leverages a pre-trained diffusion model, Stable Diffusion XL, to overcome the generalization failures of existing methods that rely on limited HDR panorama datasets. While conceptually simple, the task remains challenging because diffusion models often insert incorrect or inconsistent content and cannot readily generate chrome balls in HDR format. Our analysis reveals that the inpainting process is highly sensitive to the initial noise in the diffusion process, occasionally resulting in unrealistic outputs. To address this, we first introduce DiffusionLight, which uses iterative inpainting to compute a median chrome ball from multiple outputs to serve as a stable, low-frequency lighting prior that guides the generation of a high-quality final result. To generate high-dynamic-range (HDR) light probes, an Exposure LoRA is fine-tuned to create LDR images at multiple exposure values, which are then merged. While effective, DiffusionLight is time-intensive, requiring approximately 30 minutes per estimat
Reconstructing clothed humans from a single image is a fundamental task in computer vision with wide-ranging applications. Although existing monocular clothed human reconstruction solutions have shown promising results, they often rely on the assumption that the human subject is in an occlusion-free environment. Thus, when encountering in-the-wild occluded images, these algorithms produce multiview inconsistent and fragmented reconstructions. Additionally, most algorithms for monocular 3D human reconstruction leverage geometric priors such as SMPL annotations for training and inference, which are extremely challenging to acquire in real-world applications. To address these limitations, we propose CHROME: Clothed Human Reconstruction with Occlusion-Resilience and Multiview-ConsistEncy from a Single Image, a novel pipeline designed to reconstruct occlusion-resilient 3D humans with multiview consistency from a single occluded image, without requiring either ground-truth geometric prior annotations or 3D supervision. Specifically, CHROME leverages a multiview diffusion model to first synthesize occlusion-free human images from the occluded input, compatible with off-the-shelf pose cont
JavaScript, a scripting language employed to augment the capabilities of web browsers within web pages or browser extensions, utilizes code segments termed JavaScript inclusions. While the security aspects of JavaScript inclusions in web pages have undergone substantial scrutiny, a thorough investigation into the security of such inclusions within browser extensions remains absent, despite the divergent security paradigms governing these environments. This study presents a systematic measurement of JavaScript inclusions in Chrome extensions, employing a hybrid methodology encompassing static and dynamic analysis to identify these inclusions. The analysis of 36,324 extensions revealed 350,784 JavaScript inclusions. Subsequent security assessment indicated that, although the majority of these inclusions originate from local files within the extensions rather than external servers, 22 instances of vulnerable remote JavaScript inclusions were identified. These remote inclusions present potential avenues for malicious actors to execute arbitrary code within the extension's execution context. Furthermore, an analysis of JavaScript library utilization within Chrome extensions disclosed th
Google Chrome is the most popular Web browser. Users can customize it with extensions that enhance their browsing experience. The most well-known marketplace of such extensions is the Chrome Web Store (CWS). Developers can upload their extensions on the CWS, but such extensions are made available to users only after a vetting process carried out by Google itself. Unfortunately, some malicious extensions bypass such checks, putting the security and privacy of downstream browser extension users at risk. Here, we scrutinize the extent to which automated mechanisms reliant on supervised machine learning (ML) can be used to detect malicious extensions on the CWS. To this end, we first collect 7,140 malicious extensions published in 2017--2023. We combine this dataset with 63,598 benign extensions published or updated on the CWS before 2023, and we develop three supervised-ML-based classifiers. We show that, in a "lab setting", our classifiers work well (e.g., 98% accuracy). Then, we collect a more recent set of 35,462 extensions from the CWS, published or last updated in 2023, with unknown ground truth. We were eventually able to identify 68 malicious extensions that bypassed the vettin
We present Chunked Augmented Generation (CAG), an architecture specifically designed to overcome the context window limitations of Google Chrome's built-in Gemini Nano model. While Chrome's integration of Gemini Nano represents a significant advancement in bringing AI capabilities directly to the browser, its restricted context window poses challenges for processing large inputs. CAG addresses this limitation through intelligent input chunking and processing strategies, enabling efficient handling of extensive content while maintaining the model's performance within browser constraints. Our implementation demonstrates particular efficacy in processing large documents and datasets directly within Chrome, making sophisticated AI capabilities accessible through the browser without external API dependencies. Get started now at https://github.com/vivekVells/cag-js.
In this paper, we present Roamify, an Artificial Intelligence powered travel assistant that aims to ease the process of travel planning. We have tested and used multiple Large Language Models like Llama and T5 to generate personalised itineraries per user preferences. Results from user surveys highlight the preference for AI powered mediums over existing methods to help in travel planning across all user age groups. These results firmly validate the potential need of such a travel assistant. We highlight the two primary design considerations for travel assistance: D1) incorporating a web-scraping method to gather up-to-date news articles about destinations from various blog sources, which significantly improves our itinerary suggestions, and D2) utilising user preferences to create customised travel experiences along with a recommendation system which changes the itinerary according to the user needs. Our findings suggest that Roamify has the potential to improve and simplify how users across multiple age groups plan their travel experiences.
Web browsers, particularly Google Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers, have grown in popularity over the past decade, with browser extensions becoming an integral part of their ecosystem. These extensions can customize and enhance the user experience, providing functionality that ranges from ad blockers to, more recently, AI assistants. Given the ever-increasing importance of web browsers, distribution marketplaces for extensions play a key role in keeping users safe by vetting submissions that display abusive or malicious behavior. In this paper, we characterize the prevalence of malware and other infringing extensions in the Chrome Web Store (CWS), the largest distribution platform for this type of software. To do so, we introduce SimExt, a novel methodology for detecting similarly behaving extensions that leverages static and dynamic analysis, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and vector embeddings. Our study reveals significant gaps in the CWS vetting process, as 86% of infringing extensions are extremely similar to previously vetted items, and these extensions take months or even years to be removed. By characterizing the top kinds of infringing extension, we find that 83
This paper is the first attempt at providing a holistic view of the Chrome Web Store (CWS). We leverage historical data provided by ChromeStats to study global trends in the CWS and security implications. We first highlight the extremely short life cycles of extensions: roughly 60% of extensions stay in the CWS for one year. Second, we define and show that Security-Noteworthy Extensions (SNE) are a significant issue: they pervade the CWS for years and affect almost 350 million users. Third, we identify clusters of extensions with a similar code base. We discuss how code similarity techniques could be used to flag suspicious extensions. By developing an approach to extract URLs from extensions' comments, we show that extensions reuse code snippets from public repositories or forums, leading to the propagation of dated code and vulnerabilities. Finally, we underline a critical lack of maintenance in the CWS: 60% of the extensions in the CWS have never been updated; half of the extensions known to be vulnerable are still in the CWS and still vulnerable 2 years after disclosure; a third of extensions use vulnerable library versions. We believe that these issues should be widely known i
The growth of digitalization services via web browsers has simplified our daily routine of doing business. But at the same time, it has made the web browser very attractive for several cyber-attacks. Web phishing is a well-known cyberattack that is used by attackers camouflaging as trustworthy web servers to obtain sensitive user information such as credit card numbers, bank information, personal ID, social security number, and username and passwords. In recent years many techniques have been developed to identify the authentic web pages that users visit and warn them when the webpage is phishing. In this paper, we have developed an extension for Chrome the most favorite web browser, that will serve as a middleware between the user and phishing websites. The Chrome extension named "NoPhish" shall identify a phishing webpage based on several Machine Learning techniques. We have used the training dataset from "PhishTank" and extracted the 22 most popular features as rated by the Alexa database. The training algorithms used are Random Forest, Support Vector Machine, and k-Nearest Neighbor. The performance results show that Random Forest delivers the best precision.
We present a simple yet effective technique to estimate lighting in a single input image. Current techniques rely heavily on HDR panorama datasets to train neural networks to regress an input with limited field-of-view to a full environment map. However, these approaches often struggle with real-world, uncontrolled settings due to the limited diversity and size of their datasets. To address this problem, we leverage diffusion models trained on billions of standard images to render a chrome ball into the input image. Despite its simplicity, this task remains challenging: the diffusion models often insert incorrect or inconsistent objects and cannot readily generate images in HDR format. Our research uncovers a surprising relationship between the appearance of chrome balls and the initial diffusion noise map, which we utilize to consistently generate high-quality chrome balls. We further fine-tune an LDR diffusion model (Stable Diffusion XL) with LoRA, enabling it to perform exposure bracketing for HDR light estimation. Our method produces convincing light estimates across diverse settings and demonstrates superior generalization to in-the-wild scenarios.
Web browsers have been used widely by users to conduct various online activities, such as information seeking or online shopping. To improve user experience and extend the functionality of browsers, practitioners provide mechanisms to allow users to install third-party-provided plugins (i.e., extensions) on their browsers. However, little is known about the performance implications caused by such extensions. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to understand the impact of extensions on the user-perceived performance (i.e., energy consumption and page load time) of Google Chrome, the most popular browser. We study a total of 72 representative extensions from 11 categories (e.g., Developer Tools and Sports). We observe that browser performance can be negatively impacted by the use of extensions, even when the extensions are used in unintended circumstances (e.g., when logging into an extension is not granted but required, or when an extension is not used for designated websites). We also identify a set of factors that significantly influence the performance impact of extensions, such as code complexity and privacy practices (i.e., collection of user data) adopted by the exten
The Chromium open-source project has become a fundamental piece of the Web as we know it today, with multiple vendors offering browsers based on its codebase. One of its most popular features is the possibility of altering or enhancing the browser functionality through third-party programs known as browser extensions. Extensions have access to a wide range of capabilities through the use of APIs exposed by Chromium. The Debugger API -- arguably the most powerful of such APIs -- allows extensions to use the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP), a capability-rich tool for debugging and instrumenting the browser. In this paper, we describe several vulnerabilities present in the Debugger API and in the granting of capabilities to extensions that can be used by an attacker to take control of the browser, escalate privileges, and break context isolation. We demonstrate their impact by introducing six attacks that allow an attacker to steal user information, monitor network traffic, modify site permissions (\eg access to camera or microphone), bypass security interstitials without user intervention, and change the browser settings. Our attacks work in all major Chromium-based browsers as they a
In large software ecosystems, semantically related code changes, such as alternative solutions or overlapping modifications are often discovered only days after submission, leading to duplicated effort and delayed reviews. We present SmartPatchLinker, a browser based tool that supports the discovery of related patches directly within the code review interface. SmartPatchLinker is implemented as a lightweight Chrome extension with a local inference backend and integrates with Gerrit to retrieve and rank semantically linked changes when a reviewer opens a patch. The tool allows reviewers to configure the search scope, view ranked candidates with confidence indicators, and examine related work without leaving their workflow or relying on server-side installations. We perform both usefulness and usability evaluations to study how SmartPatchLinker can support reviewers during code review. SmartPatchLinker is open source, and its source code, Docker containers, and the replication package used in our evaluation are publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/islem-kms/gerrit-chrome-extension . A video demonstrating the tool is also available online at https://drive.google.com/driv
While several web actors have been trying to reduce web tracking for years, it remains unclear how to achieve both desirable levels of utility and privacy. In 2019, Google launched the Privacy Sandbox initiative to balance that trade-off and find privacy alternatives to common use cases such as advertising. Yet, in late 2025, Google canceled the project and deprecated most of the newly introduced APIs. Despite its end, the Privacy Sandbox represents a unique opportunity to learn about how the ecosystem reacted to the proposed changes and make observations about why and how it failed. In this paper, we present a longitudinal measurement and analysis study of the Privacy Sandbox APIs to characterize their adoption and deprecation over the past seven years by different web actors. Leveraging historical HTTP Archive crawls and public Chrome telemetry data, we offer the largest study of its kind into the prevalence of each Privacy Sandbox feature, during their entire respective lifetime (5+ years for some), on popular websites (CrUX top 100k), and as experienced by Chrome users during their browsing journey. Our results showcase an adoption that remained limited and uneven across the ye
We introduce LiteWebAgent, an open-source suite for VLM-based web agent applications. Our framework addresses a critical gap in the web agent ecosystem with a production-ready solution that combines minimal serverless backend configuration, intuitive user and browser interfaces, and extensible research capabilities in agent planning, memory, and tree search. For the core LiteWebAgent agent framework, we implemented a simple yet effective baseline using recursive function calling, providing with decoupled action generation and action grounding. In addition, we integrate advanced research components such as agent planning, agent workflow memory, and tree search in a modular and extensible manner. We then integrate the LiteWebAgent agent framework with frontend and backend as deployed systems in two formats: (1) a production Vercel-based web application, which provides users with an agent-controlled remote browser, (2) a Chrome extension leveraging LiteWebAgent's API to control an existing Chrome browser via CDP (Chrome DevTools Protocol). The LiteWebAgent framework is available at https://github.com/PathOnAI/LiteWebAgent, with deployed frontend at https://lite-web-agent.vercel.app/.
Browser extensions are additional tools developed by third parties that integrate with web browsers to extend their functionality beyond standard capabilities. However, the browser extension platform is increasingly being exploited by hackers to launch sophisticated cyber threats. These threats encompass a wide range of malicious activities, including but not limited to phishing, spying, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, email spamming, affiliate fraud, malvertising, and payment fraud. This paper examines the evolving threat landscape of malicious browser extensions in 2025, focusing on Mozilla Firefox and Chrome. Our research successfully bypassed security mechanisms of Firefox and Chrome, demonstrating that malicious extensions can still be developed, published, and executed within the Mozilla Add-ons Store and Chrome Web Store. These findings highlight the persisting weaknesses in browser's vetting process and security framework. It provides insights into the risks associated with browser extensions, helping users understand these threats while aiding the industry in developing controls and countermeasures to defend against such attacks. All experiments discussed in
Rasterization is the process of determining the color of every pixel drawn by an application. Powerful rasterization libraries like Skia, CoreGraphics, and Direct2D put exceptional effort into drawing, blending, and rendering efficiently. Yet applications are still hindered by the inefficient sequences of operations that they ask these libraries to perform. Even Google Chrome, a highly optimized program co-developed with the Skia rasterization library, still produces inefficient instruction sequences even on the top 100 most visited websites. The underlying reason for this inefficiency is that rasterization libraries have complex semantics and opaque and non-obvious execution models. To address this issue, we introduce $μ$Skia, a formal semantics for the Skia 2D graphics library, and mechanize this semantics in Lean. $μ$Skia covers language and graphics features like canvas state, the layer stack, blending, and color filters, and the semantics itself is split into three strata to separate concerns and enable extensibility. We then identify four patterns of sub-optimal Skia code produced by Google Chrome, and then write replacements for each pattern. $μ$Skia allows us to verify the
Software security testing, particularly when enhanced with deep learning models, has become a powerful approach for improving software quality, enabling faster detection of known flaws in source code. However, many approaches miss post-fix latent vulnerabilities that remain even after patches typically due to incomplete fixes or overlooked issues may later lead to zero-day exploits. In this paper, we propose $HYDRA$, a $Hy$brid heuristic-guided $D$eep $R$epresentation $A$rchitecture for predicting latent zero-day vulnerabilities in patched functions that combines rule-based heuristics with deep representation learning to detect latent risky code patterns that may persist after patches. It integrates static vulnerability rules, GraphCodeBERT embeddings, and a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to uncover anomalies often missed by symbolic or neural models alone. We evaluate HYDRA in an unsupervised setting on patched functions from three diverse real-world software projects: Chrome, Android, and ImageMagick. Our results show HYDRA predicts 13.7%, 20.6%, and 24% of functions from Chrome, Android, and ImageMagick respectively as containing latent risks, including both heuristic matches and