AIS Sanboxed Browser Issue

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

I use Chrome as my browser, and I have it set to “always be sandboxed”. I un-ticked the top 2 boxes in the “web browsers” settings tab in: additional protection > sandbox > expert settings > web browsers, and I ticked the 3rd box that talks about “not virtualizing all browser settings”. All other sandbox settings are default.

When I test the sandbox by downloading Piriform’s Speccy, it works as I would expect. It looks like the program is installing, with every box that pops up having a red boarder around it, but as soon as I close Chrome, everything is gone and was never there.

But last night, I went to my online Yahoo mail account and I wanted to watch a known clean to me, Windows Media Player video. I clicked on the attachment, saved it to my desktop and once it was loaded, I clicked open from within Chrome. ( If you are unfamiliar with Chrome, you can’t “run” a program like in IE, you have to save it like in FireFox, then chose open. ) I never looked to see if the file was on my desktop. Once I hit open from within Chrome, Windows Media Player opened with no red boarder around it. The video started to play and after 10 seconds, it froze, making a loud screeching sound and totally locked up my machine. I had to kill the machine and do a forced shutdown.

All is fine now, but my question is, shouldn’t WMP have opened up with a red boarder around it to show it was within the sandbox? Did my settings cause this? To me, this behavior indicates that the download got through the sandbox. :o

2

But was WMP sandboxed? Seems you’ve sandboxed just Chrome… Not sure if it should work that way… although a sandboxed process should open any child process also sandboxed.

3

No, WMP wasn’t / isn’t sandboxed. I thought that anything that needed to be opened or used would be sandboxed too. I’m new to sandboxing, so I don’t know if I need to change settings, or if what happened is normal behavior…Seems like it shouldn’t be?

4

Just that “run” into Chrome seems not be like you’re saying.
Or avast sandbox is being “bypassed” by Chrome.

5

No, Chrome is being run in the sandbox correctly. I see 6 processes being run in the sandbox monitor in the avast! GUI.

6

I ticked the box that allows Chrome to “save a download to the default location outside of the sandbox.” That has fixed the problem I described above, but it’s not as safe because the download is now out of the sandbox. I might try unticking that option which would keep the download in the sandbox, and I will add WMP to be run in the sandbox and then I’ll see if that works.

Most users run Free, so there’s not a lot of traffic on this AIS subject. :cry: