Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

Even in this free demo, every user has their own browser process, with its own uid owner, and that OS uid has its own limited permissions.

At the same time, it's not an insignificant risk at all and you raise a very good point, which I'm surprised no one brought up before. Thank you for bringing it to everyone's attention.

An instance is a single point of failure, it's also less attack surface. To some extent, that's a tradeoff. Relative to all devices and network infrastructure in a typical company that access the public web, there's less attack surface if all web access funnels through a BG instance. On the other hand, it's a concentration of the risks into one place. My belief is that makes it easier to manage, and that the "gap" between the client infrastructure and devices and the cloud (through which only pixels, and a wire protocol of user intent pass), makes it more secure than accessing the public web directly.

Even tho it's a single point of attack, a compromise of a cloud machine, is not the same as a compromise of a device in a company intranet, or a mobile phone of someone in the company. In order to exploit the user's local machine or their organization's network, an attacker would still need to convert any instance access they had into access of a company device or network. This could happen through attack vectors in the pixels for the screen view (less likely) or through compromising the source code that serves the thin client (more likely). This is why monitoring of source code integrity is important. Open Source is an important part of that.

At the same time, in these free demo versions the browsers only exist for 10 minutes, and, exactly as you say, hundreds of strangers are all browsing from the same machine together.

TL;DR - It's a tradeoff of centralized infrastructure. There's less attack surface, but there's also a single point of failure.

Also, if you want to responsibly dislcose any security vulnerabilities you discover, please report to cris@dosycorp.com and if you want I can acknowledge you here https://github.com/dosycorp/vulnerability-reports

Totally makes sense because you unconstrain yourself from supporting all web-browsers, rolling out features gradually, and it unconstrains you from javascript too.

Imagine instead of google docs you had microsoft excel but surrounded by a browser window, everything else is the same. I know people would pay for that. (even if I personally prefer google docs)

For the CE release, I deleted the Git history (it became too difficult to deal with branch rewrites trying to remove all the cruft and deployment secret keys etc).

But the actual current working repo for the non-free version has ~ 2400 commits[0]. And the repo that I forked that from (~ 7 months ago), I'd closed 238 issues, and the repo I forked that project from I closed 200 issues. Those previous repos are all my work built from the ground up within this last ~12 months as well. The current working repo has closed 124 issues.

My Gitlab contribs for the last year are at: https://gitlab.com/dosycorp

And it's actually a little bit over 1 year, and if I count the Gitlab contribs show there, it's over 5500.

So, yeah it's been about 2000 hours I think. Working full time every week day and most weekends, and often longer than regular hours (but also dividing the work up in the day into sprints because that's how I manage myself to work best).

It's definitely been a year.

[0]: https://imgur.com/gallery/wpNhxS0