Building Secure and Reliable Systems

Chapter 19. Case Study: Chrome Security Team

By Parisa Tabriz

with Susanne Landers and Paul Blankinship

In the early days of Google, security work—including product-focused security—was entirely centralized. Chrome was one of the first products to build out a security-focused organization, to tackle the unique challenges of building a secure, modern web browser. This case study describes the evolution of Chrome’s security team, the core principles it developed, and some concrete ideas about how to scale security across an organization.

Background and Team Evolution

In 2006, a team was formed at Google with the aim of building an open source Windows browser, in less than two years, that would be more secure, faster, and more stable than the alternatives in the market. This was an ambitious goal and presented unique security challenges:

• Modern web browsers have similar complexity to an operating system, and much of their functionality is considered security-critical.

• Client-side and Windows software were different from most of Google’s existing product and system offerings at the time, so limited transferable security expertise was available within Google’s central security team.

• Since the project intended to begin and remain predominantly open source, it had unique development and operational requirements and could not rely on Google’s corporate security practices or solutions.

This browser project ultimately launched as Google Chrome in 2008. Since then, Chrome has been credited ...