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CRX Extractor β Get any Chrome Extension source code. Learn and hack!
CRX Extractor is a tool that makes an investigation of Chrome Extensions easy. In a matter of few clicks you can download .CRX file from the Chrome WebStore and unpack it along with all scripts source code, images and assets the extension use.
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@v_ignatyev if security is your concern, it may be more useful to create a tool that grabs the source code and does some lexical analysis on it to generate security and compatibility reports. That would be killer for both the users of the extensions as well as the authors.
@v_ignatyev worth noting that Chrome has a pretty rich permissions scheme in their manifest file as well. So you see exactly what the extension is going to do when you're installing it (what powers it has).
@vhmth I thought about it, but I haven't got enough samples of malware code. Thanks for sharing the great idea!
I've never created a Chrome plugin, so I'm excited to give this a try. I'm curious how plugin creators who purposely did not make their source publicly available would feel about this.
@israelvicars once you ship your code to a client's device, you should never assume that it is safe. I certainly don't for the Opentest extension which is why we (as well as most extension authors) minify and uglify the javascript they ship. If you are on Mac, you can also access the code of any extension installed on your computer in this folder:
~/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Extensions
~ is your home directory.
@vhmth @israelvicars May I add this hack recipe onto the CRX Extractor page?
@vhmth @israelvicars btw about "uglification" there are few lines on About page. It seems to be a problem, but I've tried few very popular chrome extensions using own tool and fortunately they were containing even source code comments )
@v_ignatyev @israelvicars hmm I wouldn't consider it a problem. It's honestly quite fair.
1. You want to make sure the footprint of your extension (size of the app) is as small as possible.
2. Although you want to ensure that people can check the source code for security reasons (and because this code literally runs on their device), some level of defensibility is warranted by the author.
@vhmth @israelvicars Also I think about minor UI improvement: to change Download .CRX and Get source panes in place. Because the downloading of .crx is first and should be left. What do you think?
Nice one. I use a similar plugin with which you can view the source even without downloading : https://chrome.google.com/websto....
@risonsimon using my tool you can watch the source code of this plugin too π thanks for the link!
@ekambos There are tones. Just a few: https://chrome.google.com/websto..., https://chrome.google.com/websto...
@itai_regev try 7zip yourself. CRX is not just a zip file. It's a format over .zip file with tiny overhead, so neither unzip nor 7zip will accept this.
@v_ignatyev CRX is a zip with a different header, 7zip extracts it successfully, doing that for a very long time - read this thread
https://groups.google.com/a/chro...
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