Disable mDNS and SSDP Discovery in Google Chrome
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We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.
— Orson Welles.
If you ever check your task manager you’ll notice chrome is listening to port 5353
on Linux. Did you know you could stop it? as what this sub-process is specifically doing – listening and doing some device probing like an auto discovery which is similar to avahi
. In order to disable this Chrome functionality you need to first create a directory and policy file. You could do this by executing the command below.
sudo mkdir -p /etc/opt/chrome/policies/managed/
sudo touch /etc/opt/chrome/policies/managed/block_mdns_ssdp.json
What this does is first create a directory inside the /etc/opt/chrome
which will be used to store manage policies and create the initial policy file that we would be editing.
Then we edit the block_mdns_ssdp.json
file that we created earlier and then we put the contents below.
{
"EnableMediaRouter": false
}
This would specifically disable media router and probing of cloud printers utilized by Chrome.
NOTE: Don’t disable this functionality if you use cloud printers.
So to conclude there are some hidden sub process/services Chrome is running under the hood to manage specific Chrome functionality. So guys, what functionality or sub-process you want to disable inside Chrome? Let me know and as always live life and hope you enjoyed this article!