End-to-end web application security

  • Authors:
  • Úlfar Erlingsson;Benjamin Livshits;Yinglian Xie

  • Affiliations:
  • Microsoft Research;Microsoft Research;Microsoft Research

  • Venue:
  • HOTOS'07 Proceedings of the 11th USENIX workshop on Hot topics in operating systems
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Web applications are important, ubiquitous distributed systems whose current security relies primarily on server-side mechanisms. This paper makes the end-to-end argument that the client and server must collaborate to achieve security goals, to eliminate common security exploits, and to secure the emerging class of rich, cross-domain Web applications referred to as Web 2.0. In order to support end-to-end security, Web clients must be enhanced. We introduce Mutation-Event Transforms: an easy-to-use client-side mechanism that can enforce even fine-grained, application-specific security policies, and whose implementation requires only straightforward changes to existing Web browsers. We give numerous examples of attractive, new security policies that demonstrate the advantages of end-to-end Web application security and of our proposed mechanism.