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ATARUS. OFFENSIVE SECURITY

Products

Extension Watch

An inventory of the browser and code editor extensions on a Mac, with a readable diff of what changed in each update.

In development Being built. Nothing has been released yet.

The problem

Extensions update silently and run with broad access to the pages you visit or the code you write. An extension can change hands and then ship a malicious update to everyone who installed it, and almost nobody reads the diff.

Some of these updates hide their payload where a reviewer will not see it. The GlassWorm campaign in code editor extensions used invisible Unicode characters that show as blank space in an ordinary diff.

What it will do

  • List the extensions installed in Chrome, Brave, Edge, Arc, Firefox, VS Code, Cursor and Windsurf, with each one's version, publisher and permissions.
  • When an extension updates, show what changed in its code and its permissions as a plain text diff, with invisible and direction-changing characters made visible.
  • Point you to the browser's or editor's own controls when you want to disable or remove an extension.

What it will never do

  • Write to, disable or roll back an extension. It will read extension folders read-only, because changing browser files is what malware does.
  • Run or evaluate extension code. Packages will be treated as hostile input, with limits on archive size and file count, and symlinks out of extension folders will not be followed.
  • Call an extension safe. When it finds nothing, it will say "no change found in the code we can see". It cannot see code an extension downloads while running, or settings switched on a server, and it will say that too.
  • Fetch anything without asking. Any lookup added later will be opt-in, signed and listed in the network table on this page.

Reviews

Every product passes three reviews: an idea review before design, a design review before code, and a release review before it is listed here. A product that fails one is stopped, and the reason is recorded.

  • Idea

    Passed

    A market review and a security review kept it as the firm's extension product.

  • Design

    Passed with conditions

    The security review required read-only access, removed a planned disable and roll back feature, and kept team features out of the first version.

  • Release

    Not yet held

    Before release it has to catch known risky updates in a hand-checked test set, and the misses will be published.

What this page will carry at release

  • The version number and its release notes.
  • A summary of the release review, including the hand-checked test results and every miss.
  • A demo recorded against test extensions in a lab browser profile, never a real person's browser.
  • The app's entitlements.
  • A network table generated from the code.
  • The hash that ties the source tag to the binary, published in two places.
  • The fingerprints of the signing keys.
  • The commands to check all of the above yourself.
  • The diff of each of our own releases, run through Extension Watch itself.

The rules it is built under

The same rules apply to every product we build. The security page covers them in full. The products page lists the others.

Auditor by default
Every tool observes, inventories and reports. Read-only is the default and needs no confirmation.
Active only on targets you placed in scope
Anything that probes a live system runs only against a target inside a scope you set, after a confirmation that software, including an AI model, cannot give on your behalf.
Never a false clean
Results say what was checked and what was not. No tool will tell you something is safe.
Threat model before code
Each module gets a written threat model at its design review, before any code.
Fuzzing on every parser
Anything that reads untrusted input gets a fuzz harness and limits on size, depth and paths.
Signed and reproducible builds
Releases will be signed, with separate keys for separate jobs, and built so that anyone can match the published source to the published binary.
Outside review once there is revenue
A security firm checking its own work is not an independent check, so an outside firm will review the platform once it earns.

Follow: release notes will go out in the research feed as posts of kind Tools, and our open-source code is on GitHub.