1

I manage a VPC farm of 100+ win 10 VPCs that processes software robots. Recently We have had to start supporting applications that utilize a specific chrome extension. I need to be able to identify if this chrome extension is installed and enabled on a given machine. I have a c# application running on all of the machines that reports health statistics, memory/disk/cpu utilization, os version browser version, etc.. to a database. I would like for this application to, at a minimum, be able to check and see if a particular chrome extension is installed and enabled on the machine. Ideally, if it is installed but not enabled, I would like to be able to programmatically enable it as well.

Everything I am seeing seems to be checking from within chrome. I would like to be able to use my c# App to test without loading chrome if possible.

Eli Silverman
  • 21
  • 1
  • You cal look for the (app's GUID) folder in chrome's extensions folders to see if has been downloaded, but I don't think there's a way to tell that it is enabled in chrome's settings outside of chrome itself. – Dave S Jul 18 '19 at 20:56
  • Chrome handles this on a per-user basis. Worse, it's in the registry, and user registry hives are not even loaded outside of the context for that user. So it's not even a case of getting permissions to the right folder or file. If your monitor application isn't running in the exact right user context, this info is simply **not available**. – Joel Coehoorn Jul 19 '19 at 02:49

1 Answers1

2

If it were possible to enable the extension from outside Chrome, that could be argued to constitute a security vulnerability. If you find a way to do it, you have probably found a security hole. :P

For that matter, I would also argue its an even larger security vulnerability to be able to enable it programmatically from within Chrome. I highly doubt its possible at all.

As far as detecting if its enabled...

There is a lot of discussion about detecting installation on this thread: Check whether user has a Chrome extension installed

Some of the answers apply to checking for enabled state. However, the only one that looks like you could do externally is to use the cookie method. Unfortunately, that won't even work unless the extension generates cookies AND it has actually executed to make a cookie. Of course, if you're lucky and the extension creates a cookie as soon as it gets enabled or when Chrome starts, then you could use that method.

Here is a 3rd party software that claims to read Chrome cookies (just proof, that the cookies are apparently readable externally) https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/chrome_cookies_view.html

Joel Coehoorn
  • 399,467
  • 113
  • 570
  • 794
JamesHoux
  • 2,999
  • 3
  • 32
  • 50