Better password protections in Chrome - How it works

Posted by Patrick Nepper, Kiran C. Nair, Vasilii Sukhanov and Varun Khaneja, Chrome Team

Today, we announced better password protections in Chrome, gradually rolling out with release M79. Here are the details of how they work.


Warnings about compromised passwords
Google first introduced password breach warnings as a Password Checkup extension early this year. It compares passwords and usernames against over 4 billion credentials that Google knows to have been compromised. You can read more about it here. In October, Google built the Password Checkup feature into the Google Account, making it available from passwords.google.com.

Chrome’s integration is a natural next step to ensure we protect even more users as they browse the web. Here is how it works:

• Whenever Google discovers a username and password exposed by another company’s data breach, we store a hashed and encrypted copy of the data on our servers with a secret key known only to Google.
• When you sign in to a website, Chrome will send a hashed copy of your username and password to Google encrypted with a secret key only known to Chrome. No one, including Google, is able to derive your username or password from this encrypted copy.
• In order to determine if your username and password appears in any breach, we use a technique called private set intersection with blinding that involves multiple layers of encryption. This allows us to compare your encrypted username and password with all of the encrypted breached usernames and passwords, without revealing your username and password, or revealing any information about any other users’ usernames and passwords. In order to make this computation more efficient, Chrome sends a 3-byte SHA256 hash prefix of your username to reduce the scale of the data joined from 4 billion records down to 250 records, while still ensuring your username remains anonymous.
• Only you discover if your username and password have been compromised. If they have been compromised, Chrome will tell you, and we strongly encourage you to change your password.

You can control this feature in the “Sync and Google Services” section of Chrome Settings. Enterprise admins can control this feature using the Password​Leak​Detection​Enabled policy setting.


Real-time phishing protection: Checking with Safe Browsing’s blocklist in real time.
Chrome’s new real-time phishing protection is also expanding existing technology — in this case it’s Google’s well-established Safe Browsing.

Every day, Safe Browsing discovers thousands of new unsafe sites and adds them to the blocklists shared with the web industry. Chrome checks the URL of each site you visit or file you download against this local list, which is updated approximately every 30 minutes. If you navigate to a URL that appears on the list, Chrome checks a partial URL fingerprint (the first 32 bits of a SHA-256 hash of the URL) with Google for verification that the URL is indeed dangerous. Google cannot determine the actual URL from this information.

However, we’re noticing that some phishing sites slip through our 30-minute refresh window, either by switching domains very quickly or by hiding from Google's crawlers.

That’s where real-time phishing protections come in. These new protections can inspect the URLs of pages visited with Safe Browsing’s servers in real time. When you visit a website, Chrome checks it against a list stored on your computer of thousands of popular websites that are known to be safe. If the website is not on the safe-list, Chrome checks the URL with Google (after dropping any username or password embedded in the URL) to find out if you're visiting a dangerous site. Our analysis has shown that this results in a 30% increase in protections by warning users on malicious sites that are brand new.

We will be initially rolling out this feature for people who have already opted-in to “Make searches and browsing better” setting in Chrome. Enterprises administrators can manage this setting via the Url​Keyed​Anonymized​Data​Collection​Enabled policy settings.


Expanding predictive phishing protection
Your password is the key to your online identity and data. If this key falls into the hands of attackers, they can easily impersonate you and get access to your data. We launched predictive phishing protections to warn users who are syncing history in Chrome when they enter their Google Account password into suspected phishing sites that try to steal their credentials.

With this latest release, we’re expanding this protection to everyone signed in to Chrome, even if you have not enabled Sync. In addition, this feature will now work for all the passwords you have stored in Chrome’s password manager.

If you type one of your protected passwords (this could be a password you stored in Chrome’s password manager, or the Google Account password you used to sign in to Chrome) into an unusual site, Chrome classifies this as a potentially dangerous event.

In such a scenario, Chrome checks the site against a list on your computer of thousands of popular websites that are known to be safe. If the website is not on the safe-list, Chrome checks the URL with Google (after dropping any username or password embedded in the URL). If this check determines that the site is indeed suspicious or malicious, Chrome will immediately show you a warning and encourage you to change your compromised password. If it was your Google Account password that was phished, Chrome also offers to notify Google so we can add additional protections to ensure your account isn't compromised.

By watching for password reuse, Chrome can give heightened security in critical moments while minimizing the data it shares with Google. We think predictive phishing protection will protect hundreds of millions more people.