A Quick Walkthrough on Remote Browser Isolation (RBI)
With the active growth of digitization and increased use of web browsers for accessing online services, browser-based attacks increased. Enterprises are suffering more often from browser-based attacks that target remote employees. Traditional heuristic and detection-based techniques might stop browser-based attacks that they know. But stealthy and sophisticated attacks may still get through the browsers and compromise end-user systems.
That is where Remote browser isolation (RBI) comes into the picture.
According to Sans Institute’s report, 48 percent of threats entered enterprises through web-based drive-by download attacks. They have also reported that browser-borne malware attacks cost companies 3.2 million USD (on average) per year. All these facts confirm that enterprises must leverage secure remote browsing techniques like Remote browser isolation (RBI).
This article is a complete walkthrough on Remote browser isolation (RBI), its types, how it works, its benefits and various challenges.
What is Remote Browser Isolation (RBI)?
Website redirection and phishing are well-known attacks where the user might unknowingly browse a malicious page containing malicious code that steals user credentials or deliver malware to the user’s system. That is where enterprises need isolated browsing for remote employees.
Remote browser isolation (RBI), also known as web isolation or browser isolation, is a web security solution designed to protect users from Internet-borne threats. According to a Gartner Inc. report, by 2022, 25 percent of enterprises will have adopted browser isolation techniques. By rendering Internet content in a sandboxed environment and delivering only the final rendered page to the browser, it protects against some malware embedded in web pages.
This virtualization technique moves browser execution from a user’s device to a secure environment. This “secure” environment could be a remote cloud-based environment or an isolated space locally on the user’s device.
Browser isolation ensures that no hostile attempts or malware code gets access to the endpoint systems of the enterprise. Hence Remote Browser Isolation (RBI) has become the most trusted web threat protection tool. To know about browser ad-on-based attacks, tap here.
Types of Remote Browser Isolation
Depending on the scope of the web isolation and specific resource, businesses can deploy different types of RBI solutions to mitigate cyber risks:
➡ Remote Browser Isolation for Unauthorized Access Control: RBI is activated anytime an unknown user accesses an application or database — letting them only view the data and not alter it.
➡ Document-Based Remote Browser Isolation: Any documents downloaded from the internet prompt RBI activation for view privileges only.
➡ Remote Browser Isolation for Email Links: Used to protect from email-based attacks such as phishing scams. Activates RBI only when an email has embedded web links in which “view-only” gets prompted.
➡ Comprehensive Remote Browser Isolation: Assumes all websites are risky — employing RBI for all web sessions.
➡ Website-Targeted Remote Browser Isolation: Activates specifically when a user navigates to unknown pages or websites deemed risk using disposable sandbox environments for each session.
How does Remote Browser Isolation (RBI) work?
The internal architecture of virtualization depends on containerization or virtualization. When an attacker delivers malicious code through hostile websites, the web browser accepts and executes such code from that visited site. Remote Browser Isolation (RBI) technique will eliminate this in-browser code execution to protect the employee from downloading anything illicit. The RBI technique will push the entire execution of the browser to an isolated yet secure browsing environment hosted in the cloud. The complete browsing executes within the sandboxed environment.
Therefore, all the malicious actions, like wicked email attachments, zero-day malware, ransomware, wicked scripts, adware, etc., get filtered out, and the employee enjoys a filtered browsing experience. Once the filtering process completes by the RBI, it will deliver the page to the user/employee as normal browsing. The temporary sandboxed environment later gets disposed of from the isolated cloud environment. This process enables employees to browse even potentially malware-laden sites with no or less risk. But RBI solutions are expensive and often add latency to the connection.
Here is a rundown of how remote browser isolation works:
⦾ A user tries to access potentially malicious web content
⦾ The request is evaluated against defined policies, and if there’s a match, the platform creates an isolated browser session
⦾ The platform connects to the content and loads it onto the remote isolated browser
⦾ Rendered web content is streamed to the end user’s native browser as pixels over an HTML5 canvas
History of Remote Browser Isolation
The strategy of isolated browsing, networks, servers, applications, and devices to prevent or maintain the effects of a cyber attack has been around for decades. It wasn’t until 2010, however, that the first official browser isolation technology platform was developed, commercialized, and adopted by the National Nuclear Security Administration. The service gave government employees a secure internet surfing method through machine virtualization.
Significant development took place in 2018, when the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), the IT department within the Department of Defense (DoD), issued a request for information (RFI) regarding cloud-based internet isolation — the exact function of RBI. They had been interested in solutions for reducing the network security risks that come with employees browsing the web or rerouting to a malicious website through phishing emails.
Benefits of Remote Browser Isolation (RBI)
Remote Browser Isolation (RBI) is a cutting-edge technique used by many enterprises to secure the browsing experience for employees. Let us explore some benefits of RBI.
⁍ Prevents phishing: When employees or users unknowingly click any phishing link or open any phishing email, the RBI solution will sanitize the email text, scan the attachments, check the link for redirection, and other critical factors. If the solution finds that a phishing email or link redirects to a malicious web page or URL, it will isolate the entire process.
⁍ Prevent zero-day attacks: Web-based zero-day attacks have become more popular with the increased use of web applications. Traditional security solutions can stop suspicious or harmful attacks whose pattern or signature is already known to the system. But RBI uses advanced techniques to prevent systems from zero-day browser-based attacks.
⁍ Preventing exfiltration of confidential data: Security admins can configure the RBI settings so that employees can only browse suspicious web pages in read-only mode. That way, employees will not be able to provide or input any credentials to those sites. Also, RBI security settings allow only trusted sites for browsing. All these measures prevent exfiltrating confidential enterprise or employee details.
⁍ Generate details of employee activity logs: On the remote instance of RBI, it will log all the activities of different employees. Through these activity logs, admins can review the cybersecurity incident, understand its root cause, and act accordingly. These logs also help in cyber forensics, training ML algorithms, and preventing infrastructures from similar situations.
Challenges of Remote Browser Isolation
While RBI takes a logical and proactive approach to secure endpoints, there are some significant computing and user experience drawbacks to consider before investing:
Slower Processing Speeds
Latency is a significant issue for a solid user experience. Users should expect high lag times and slow pixel loading speeds with the computing requirements needed to divert a web page to a remote server and then securely back to the endpoint.
Limited Website Support
While great for securely accessing simple web pages, RBI may be suitable for something other than complex websites. During pixel reconstruction and the rerouting back to the endpoint, the web page content could be incomplete or broken.
Infrastructure Stress
RBI streams visual pixels of web pages to an endpoint. Streaming requires tons of bandwidth and processing power that can engulf an unsuitable infrastructure with slow speeds or even entire system shutdowns.
Conclusion
Browser-based threats like credential stuffing, phishing, drive-by download attacks, and web app vulnerability exploitation have become more common. That is where remote browser isolation (RBI) solutions can come to the rescue. In this article, we gathered insight into how Remote Browser Isolation (RBI) technology moves browser execution from a user’s system to a remote sandboxed endpoint. It also explained how it benefits enterprises by preventing employees’ browsing. To know more about how to leverage RBI, tap Packetlabs. They have experts to provide security guidance with a unique touch for advanced protection.
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