System security, platform security and usability
Proceedings of the fifth ACM workshop on Scalable trusted computing
Trust and protection in the Illinois browser operating system
OSDI'10 Proceedings of the 9th USENIX conference on Operating systems design and implementation
Mitigating cross-site form history spamming attacks with domain-based ranking
DIMVA'11 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Detection of intrusions and malware, and vulnerability assessment
Fortifying web-based applications automatically
Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
Practical end-to-end web content integrity
Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web
Establishing browser security guarantees through formal shim verification
Security'12 Proceedings of the 21st USENIX conference on Security symposium
Better security and privacy for web browsers: a survey of techniques, and a new implementation
FAST'11 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Formal Aspects of Security and Trust
FlowFox: a web browser with flexible and precise information flow control
Proceedings of the 2012 ACM conference on Computer and communications security
A measurement study of insecure javascript practices on the web
ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB)
Content-based isolation: rethinking isolation policy design on client systems
Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGSAC conference on Computer & communications security
A secure proxy-based cross-domain communication for web mashups
Journal of Web Engineering
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Web browsers' access control policies have evolved piecemeal in an ad-hoc fashion with the introduction of new browser features. This has resulted in numerous incoherencies. In this paper, we analyze three major access control flaws in today's browsers: (1) principal labeling is different for different resources, raising problems when resources interplay, (2) runtime changes to principal identities are handled inconsistently, and (3)browsers mismanage resources belonging to the user principal. We show that such mishandling of principals leads to many access control incoherencies, presenting hurdles for web developers to construct secure web applications. A unique contribution of this paper is to identify the compatibility cost of removing these unsafe browser features. To do this, we have built WebAnalyzer, a crawler-based framework for measuring real-world usage of browser features, and used it to study the top 100,000 popular web sites ranked by Alexa. Our methodology and results serve as a guideline for browser designers to balance security and backward compatibility.