The effectiveness of application permissions
WebApps'11 Proceedings of the 2nd USENIX conference on Web application development
Secure distributed programming with value-dependent types
Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
An evaluation of the Google Chrome extension security architecture
Security'12 Proceedings of the 21st USENIX conference on Security symposium
Privilege separation in HTML5 applications
Security'12 Proceedings of the 21st USENIX conference on Security symposium
An analysis of the mozilla jetpack extension framework
ECOOP'12 Proceedings of the 26th European conference on Object-Oriented Programming
Detecting and analyzing insecure component usage
Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT 20th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
ESOP'13 Proceedings of the 22nd European conference on Programming Languages and Systems
Practical static analysis of JavaScript applications in the presence of frameworks and libraries
Proceedings of the 2013 9th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering
Verifying higher-order programs with the dijkstra monad
Proceedings of the 34th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation
Securing legacy firefox extensions with SENTINEL
DIMVA'13 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment
Security Signature Inference for JavaScript-based Browser Addons
Proceedings of Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization
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Popup blocking, form filling, and many other features of modern web browsers were first introduced as third-party extensions. New extensions continue to enrich browsers in unanticipated ways. However, powerful extensions require capabilities, such as cross-domain network access and local storage, which, if used improperly, pose a security risk. Several browsers try to limit extension capabilities, but an empirical survey we conducted shows that many extensions are over-privileged under existing mechanisms. This paper presents \ibex, a new framework for authoring, analyzing, verifying, and deploying secure browser extensions. Our approach is based on using type-safe, high-level languages to program extensions against an API providing access to a variety of browser features. We propose using Data log to specify fine-grained access control and dataflow policies to limit the ways in which an extension can use this API, thus restricting its privilege over security-sensitive web content and browser resources. We formalize the semantics of policies in terms of a safety property on the execution of extensions and develop a verification methodology that allows us to statically check extensions for policy compliance. Additionally, we provide visualization tools to assist with policy analysis, and compilers to translate extension source code to either. NET byte code or JavaScript, facilitating cross-browser deployment of extensions. We evaluate our work by implementing and verifying~\NumExt extensions with a diverse set of features and security policies. We deploy our extensions in Internet Explorer, Chrome, Fire fox, and a new experimental HTML5 platform called C3. In so doing, we demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of our approach.