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Grammarly shared its tokens with all websites

bugs.chromium.org

1–10 of 176 posts

Re: Grammarly shared its tokens with all websites

#3
post #2

TL;DR: update your Grammarly plugins so that you get the fix to this issue.

Maybe I'll sound stupid, but is it possible to force an update of a chrome extension without removing it and then adding it again from the store? Is that application-specific?

thx!

Re: Grammarly shared its tokens with all websites

#5
I nearly missed this bit at the bottom:

> Grammarly had fixed the issue and released an update to the Chrome Web Store within a few hours, a really impressive response time.

Nice to see a company take this kind of thing appropriately seriously (although of course it should never have happened in the first place).

Re: Grammarly shared its tokens with all websites

#6
This, just like Mozilla’s screenshot addon, and all the other examples, shows why it’s an insane idea to mix addon content with the websites, and why it’s important to make sure that addon content can run on the UI layer of the browser, and not within of the content of the sites.

Relying on "best practices" is always a security disaster waiting to happen, if you don’t enforce security and separation in the design of the APIs and languages already, you won’t get security.

Re: Grammarly shared its tokens with all websites

#7
I feel like the first thing we should talk about is how this is effectively a keylogger, similar to Windows 10's inking and typing setting, albeit with likely poorer security.

Collecting everything you type into a web browser (or MS Office) and sending it to them seems like a really bad idea.

Re: Grammarly shared its tokens with all websites

#8

I nearly missed this bit at the bottom: > Grammarly had fixed the issue and released an update to the Chrome Web Store within a few hours, a really impressive response time. Nice to see a company take this kind of thing appropriately seriously (although of course it should never have happened in the first place).

I was trying to reproduce the bug when I got to that line... nice to see it fixed quickly.

Re: Grammarly shared its tokens with all websites

#9
post #3
post #2

TL;DR: update your Grammarly plugins so that you get the fix to this issue.

Maybe I'll sound stupid, but is it possible to force an update of a chrome extension without removing it and then adding it again from the store? Is that application-specific? thx!

If a new version is available on the store it will update automatically from time to time. You can trigger the auto-updates from your extensions settings page.

Re: Grammarly shared its tokens with all websites

#10

I feel like the first thing we should talk about is how this is effectively a keylogger, similar to Windows 10's inking and typing setting, albeit with likely poorer security. Collecting everything you type into a web browser (or MS Office) and sending it to them seems like a really bad idea.

Yes, it is crazy. For these cases we shouldn't be using SaaS at all. Installed applications can still be useful, I guess.
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