Google Safe Browsing and Bro
August 9, 2011
Megan Sullivan
NERSC / Berkeley Lab SULI summer intern
Google Safe Browsing and Bro
Currently, Google provides a service called Safe Browsing, which is used by both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox to prevent users from accessing malicious webpages. When an application attempts to connect to a URL, the URL is first checked against a Google-maintained list of known malware sites to determine whether or not it is safe. If the URL is found in the database, a warning is presented to the user. The NERSC security team has developed a method to incorporate this Safe Browsing implementation into Bro's current network monitoring policy. The method uses a local copy of Google's blacklist to cross-reference URLs in any HTTP connections seen by Bro. At this point, any malicious URLs detected are logged by Bro, but future implementation may block the user from accessing malicious sites.
About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is the primary high-performance computing facility for scientific research sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the NERSC Center serves more than 4,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in combustion, climate modeling, fusion energy, materials science, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California for the U.S. DOE Office of Science. For more information about computing sciences at Berkeley Lab, please visit www.lbl.gov/cs.
