The web browser is arguably the most important piece of software on your computer. You spend much of your time online inside a browser: when you search, chat, email, shop, bank, read the news, and watch videos online, you often do all this using a browser.
Google recently released Chrome 86, which includes a number of improvements to security features. The headline feature of this new release is that the Password Checkup feature will now be available on Android and iOS.
Password Checkup takes the passwords that users have saved in their Chrome browser and compares them to known data leaks to see if any of these passwords are compromised.
Additionally, the Safety Check feature will now support the “.well-known/change-password” standard. This means that users will be able to press a button in their Chrome password settings menu to visit the appropriate page that allows them to change their password immediately.
This is useful if the Password Checkup finds that certain passwords have been compromised and the user, therefore, wants to change their password immediately.
Other changes
Google also announced that it will be adding its touch-to-fill feature to iOS devices. Touch-to-fill allows users to tap a button and have their password automatically filled out if it is stored by Google’s password manager.
This is valuable as it helps users avoid being caught out by keylogging software or phishing websites. Users on iOS will also be asked to authenticate themselves using a biometric security feature before they auto-fill their passwords using touch-to-fill.
To further prevent users from filling in private data in a way that can be captured by malicious parties, Google has implemented an insecure forms feature. This refers to forms that are hosted on HTTPS pages but submit data via non-encrypted HTTP processes.
When users fill data into these forms, Autofill will automatically be turned off. Google has also taken the next step in its process of protecting users from downloads that take place via HTTP when the webpage shows HTTPS.
Chrome users will now be warned if they are downloading file types such as .pdf and .docx from one of these websites, while archive and executable files have been blocked completely on these websites.
