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Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

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Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

#11

Post by angry_octet »

gotts wrote: post #8

I must be missing something but can someone please explain how browsergap > self-host on your own machine (at home, or in a VPS, VPC or the public cloud) is more secure/private then just setting up a VPN on that machine?

As I understand it, it's like an extreme sandbox -- a completely separate computer (or a VM) where all the web stuff happens (javascript etc), which just ships pixels to your computer (phone/laptop etc). Ideally the complexity of the client software is low, i.e. not a web browser, and there is strict site isolation (VMs) at the sandbox side to prevent leakage from one site to another. I'm a little vague as to how this implementation works.

So this is nothing to do with a VPN as such, but of course you could host it in the cloud, or run a VPN to a cloud endpoint.

Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

#12

Post by slowenough »

dlandis wrote: post #9

Could someone write a few sentences about what it is and how it works, and why it is significant? I see neither this post, the GH repo, nor its website really says much of anything on the subject. I only see info about why it’s being open sourced and how to set it up. If someone were to go to all that trouble, I am surprised they would stop short on just providing basic info.

Sure, BrowserGap is a remote browser isolation product. RBI means accessing the public internet through a browser that runs in the cloud, rather than through a browser that runs on your device. This helps protect you from attacks on the web.

Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

#14

Post by slowenough »

slowenough wrote: post #12
dlandis wrote: post #9

Could someone write a few sentences about what it is and how it works, and why it is significant? I see neither this post, the GH repo, nor its website really says much of anything on the subject. I only see info about why it’s being open sourced and how to set it up. If someone were to go to all that trouble, I am surprised they would stop short on just providing basic info.

Sure, BrowserGap is a remote browser isolation product. RBI means accessing the public internet through a browser that runs in the cloud, rather than through a browser that runs on your device. This helps protect you from attacks on the web.

And, if you're interested, read on for more detail.

It works by providing a thin client over the web that you connect your regular browser to. The thin client provides an interface to a remote browser that you interact with the browser the public internet.

This is significant because the internet is a cesspool of attacks. Malware, ransomware, virii, tracking, exploited PDFs, ways to deliver device zero days over the web, browser zero days. All these things can lead to the security of your device and network being compromised, causing significant inconvenience, distress and loss for you.

BrowserGap and the RBI methodology acknowledges that not all threats can be detected and neutralized (such as by virus scanners), in order to face that reality, RBI adopts a "isolation" posture towards threats, effectively isolating them in the remote machine and preventing them from reaching your device.

With BrowserGap, in order to render the content of a web page, the only thing we send to your device form the remote page is pixels. So no HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc from your browsing is ever executed on your device.

Cloud-based internet isolation is another name for this security practice and it is an emerging industry. Symantec recently acquired a company in this space, and Menlo Security was awarded[2] an agreement to build a CBII prototype for DISA, after a June 2018 request for RBI solutions that could eventually serve 60% of DoD's ~ 3 million users[0][1].

See more about RBI[1].

[0]: https://secureview.cloudbrowser.xyz/uploads/fileajqk.kkpgdih...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_isolation

[2]: https://www.menlosecurity.com/press-releases-blog/disa-cloud...

Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

#15

Post by slowenough »

infinitone wrote: post #13

Just tried it acouple times and keep getting hit by google captcha... Maybe this is the Google AI team trying to get more people to solv'em? ;-)

Good point, let me temporarily switch the default search provider to DuckDuckGo. This will take a while to propagate to the browsers.

A workaround in the meantime is to enter a URL in the box instead.

Edit: Switched to DDG as default search provider for this. Back up at 21:24 PST.

Edit @23:00 PST: I've opened an issue with Google Cloud Support (the system is hosted on GCP even tho it is cloud-agnostic) and I don't expect they will be able to provide a resolution because this is probably the CAPTCHA behaving correctly.

BTW, it could be the AI team getting some more data, who knows? ;)

Somehow tho I think whatever we do is simply a drop in a bucket for them.

Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

#16

Post by xendipity »

slowenough wrote: post #12
dlandis wrote: post #9

Could someone write a few sentences about what it is and how it works, and why it is significant? I see neither this post, the GH repo, nor its website really says much of anything on the subject. I only see info about why it’s being open sourced and how to set it up. If someone were to go to all that trouble, I am surprised they would stop short on just providing basic info.

Sure, BrowserGap is a remote browser isolation product. RBI means accessing the public internet through a browser that runs in the cloud, rather than through a browser that runs on your device. This helps protect you from attacks on the web.

Wow, that's awesome! Seems like it opens a lot of powerful possibilities.

I am a pretty technical person but also didn't know (and couldn't find) info on what RBI is and how it can be used - would love to see this information highlighted on GH and the website.

Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

#17

Post by slowenough »

xendipity wrote: post #16
slowenough wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, BrowserGap is a remote browser isolation product. RBI means accessing the public internet through a browser that runs in the cloud, rather than through a browser that runs on your device. This helps protect you from attacks on the web.

Wow, that's awesome! Seems like it opens a lot of powerful possibilities. I am a pretty technical person but also didn't know (and couldn't find) info on what RBI is and how it can be used - would love to see this information highlighted on GH and the website.

Thanks, I will add that to the GitHub.

What really excites me about this is the ability to deliver a secure "workflow automation" solution to people over any device.

Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

#18

Post by pcr910303 »

Hmm, I'm not sure if people in the western world can use it but in South Korea (with a 1Gbps network) this is basically unusable.

It has too much latency, text doesn't get entered, scrolling doesn't work, etc... Is the experience from US similar? Or is this just b.c. of server latency?

Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

#19

Post by judge2020 »

pcr910303 wrote: post #18

Hmm, I'm not sure if people in the western world can use it but in South Korea (with a 1Gbps network) this is basically unusable. It has too much latency, text doesn't get entered, scrolling doesn't work, etc... Is the experience from US similar? Or is this just b.c. of server latency?

If you're talking about the free/demo version, it's hosted in a US-East GCP instance and the author said elsewhere in the thread that it's under heavy load, i imagine a self-hosted instance would work well.
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