It seems every now and again some popular Chrome or Firefox extension decides to “go evil” seemingly out of nowhere.
Stylish got caught logging browser history, The Great Suspender turned out to be spyware, and, in the case of “get cookies.txt”, which was endorsed by youtube-dl, apparently the user is not the only one “getting” the cookies.
In most of these cases, it seems that trustworthy extensions get sold off to some shady third parties, or the developers just “turns evil”. This got me wondering: would it be an effective security precaution to simply disable updates for browser extensions? i.e. to download the extension manually from the developer, instead of relying on chrome web store / firefox addon catalogue. It wouldn’t help much if the extension you’re using contains malware now, but it would prevent malware being installed in potential future updates.
So, what do you guys think?
Some Linux distros (e.g. Debian) simply offer the most popular extensions via distro repositories. Those are guaranteed to be checked by the package maintainer, so even if the extension upstream goes evil, the extension provided via distro repo won’t be affected, as the package maintainer simply wouldn’t push malicious code to the users.