Chromium Extension Service

This is a service used by Chromium Update Notifications for error tracking and to increase privacy when fetching update info for installed extensions from the Chrome Web Store (strips cookies with personal data).

Requirements

• Vercel
• A MongoDB database (for persistence and caching)
• The environment variable MONGODB_URI provided via Vercel Secrets (prod) or a local .env file (dev)

Usage

Note: The responses you see here is all that's ever saved anywhere, nothing else – particularly client (end user) data – is collected.

Error tracking

Helps improving the extension.

Send a POST request to /api/errorlogs with the following JSON body:

{
  "error": "JSON.stringify(<Error object>, Object.getOwnPropertyNames(<Error object>))",
  "pluginVersion": "<plugin version used>"
}

The service will then store the following document in the database:

{
  "_id": "5dc89e461f8c375aa22424cc",
  "createdAt": "2019-11-10T23:33:26.525Z",
  "error": "<Error object>",
  "hashedIp": "1a3a493b",
  "pluginVersion": "<plugin version used>",
  "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.390 4.97 Safari/537.36"
}

Version info for installed extensions

When your browser requests data from update_url endpoints directly, cookies with personal data might be transmitted along the way. In my test set-up, requests to update_urls of extensions obtained from Chrome Web Store included the following personal data and adtech-related cookies (even though I wasn't logged in into any Google account):

• 1P_JAR
• APISID
• HSID
• NID
• SAPISID
• SID
• SIDCC
• SSID

(See also https://policies.google.com/technologies/types)

If you don't want these cookies to be transmitted, you can use this proxy endpoint to request version info for installed extensions. Enabling "Increase privacy" in Chromium Update Notifications does exactly that.

Send a POST request to /api with the following JSON body:

{
  "prodversion": "<Chromium version>",
  "extensions": [
    { "id": "<extension id>",  "updateUrl": "<URL to Omaha-compatible endpoint>"},
    { "id": "<extension id>",  "updateUrl": "<URL to Omaha-compatible endpoint>"},
    …
  ]
}

The service will respond with an array consisting of version info and meta data of said extensions:

[
  {
    "codebase": "https://clients2.googleusercontent.com/crx/blobs/QgAAAC6zw0qH2DJtnXe8Z7rUJP0-NOcA97MmZN4Ln1fODAHweMXNXTmjgerLCPXhmXNXwEVIEkarzGIkPHrBXBeXqsjm4UfxBJBNpSCt104KOFaeAMZSmuWy9iapD9CEzrK8OfYl3Nvw2dw3Iw/extension_347_0_0_0.crx",
    "id": "chlffgpmiacpedhhbkiomidkjlcfhogd",
    "fp": "1.c989572d0b4c9c933f7c97224fbc49612e210b2dba994f90c87491cac53282dc",
    "hash_sha256": "c989572d0b4c9c933f7c97224fbc49612e210b2dba994f90c87491cac53282dc",
    "prodversion": "77.0.3865.90",
    "protected": "0",
    "size": "443571",
    "status": "ok",
    "timestamp": 1569175526216,
    "updateUrl": "https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx",
    "version": "347",
    "_id": "5d86ab09f5eeeb001cc06c34"
  },
  {
    …
  }
]