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Google is constantly under attack. But while hackers have compromised gaming giants<\/a>, casinos<\/a> and other technology giants<\/a> in recent months, Google has so far remained largely<\/a> unscathed.<\/p>\n Parisa Tabriz, who is responsible for Chrome web browser security and Project Zero, credits much of this to the company\u2019s approach to access control.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re evolving Google\u2019s infrastructure to assume that maybe some employee has been hacked. How do we mitigate the risk of that?\u201d Tabriz said during a panel discussion at TechCrunch Disrupt on Thursday. \u201cPart of this is access control; sometimes people ask me \u2018can you help me debug this thing in Gmail\u2019 and I can\u2019t help because I don\u2019t have access.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re very proud to stay out of the headlines, but that doesn\u2019t mean that there aren\u2019t issues that we work on and address,\u201d Tabriz said.<\/p>\n Tabriz doesn\u2019t just have to worry about Google being hacked, as she also has the security of Google Chrome\u2019s three billion-plus users to consider.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have a wide range of users, each with different personal preferences or even the kind of threats that they\u2019re thinking. We also have users that want to make sure they\u2019re opting into the most advanced security protection so they have a higher threat profile, such as journalists,\u201d said Tabriz. \u201cIt can be challenging supporting that range of users and making it simple to use in a way that doesn\u2019t result in crappy software.\u201d<\/p>\n Another challenge for Tabriz and her team of thousands of engineers is balancing security and privacy: It\u2019s no secret that Google makes its money from data and advertising, how can this be balanced with the security of users?<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s super top of mind. Ads are an important part of the web and are related to Google\u2019s mission of universal access to information,\u201d Tabriz said. \u201cI remember for a while that ads were a vector for drive-by malware \u2014 so we are investing to make sure that ads also are not introducing security risks.\u201d<\/p>\n While Google has successfully fended off hackers, for the most part, Tabriz acknowledges that if she could go back and re-architect Chrome, there are things she would do differently.<\/p>\n \u201cAs an organization, you constantly need to invest,\u201d Tabriz said. \u201cOne of the things we\u2019re focused on right now is memory safety issues. In some ways, C++ is a very powerful language that you can really optimize for performance, but it\u2019s also a language that can lead to a lot of problems. We\u2019re looking at how can we experiment with Rust and other memory safe languages \u2014 and it\u2019s hard to kind of retroactively do that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n