Slimium: Debloating the Chromium Browser with Feature Subsetting

Abstract

Today, a web browser plays a crucial role in offering a broad spectrum of web experiences. The most popular browser, Chromium, has become an extremely complex application to meet ever-increasing user demands, exposing unavoidably large attack vectors due to its large code base. Code debloating attracts attention as a means of reducing such a potential attack surface by eliminating unused code. However, it is very challenging to perform sophisticated code removal without breaking needed functionalities because Chromium operates on a large number of closely connected and complex components, such as a renderer and JavaScript engine. In this paper, we present Slimium, a debloating framework for a browser (i.e., Chromium) that harnesses a hybrid approach for a fast and reliable binary instrumentation. The main idea behind Slimium is to determine a set of features as a debloating unit on top of a hybrid (i.e., static, dynamic, heuristic) analysis, and then leverage feature subsetting to code debloating. It aids in i) focusing on security-oriented features, ii) discarding unneeded code simply without complications, and iii)~reasonably addressing a non-deterministic path problem raised from code complexity. To this end, we generate a feature-code map with a relation vector technique and prompt webpage profiling results. Our experimental results demonstrate the practicality and feasibility of Slimium for 40 popular websites, as on average it removes 94 CVEs (61.4%) by cutting down 23.85 MB code (53.1%) from defined features (21.7% of the whole) in Chromium.