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You Can’t Be Me: Enabling Trusted Paths and User Sub-origins in Web Browsers

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Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses (RAID 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 8688))

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Abstract

Once a web application authenticates a user, it loosely associates all resources owned by the user to the web session established. Consequently, any scripts injected into the victim web session attain unfettered access to user-owned resources, including scripts that commit malicious activities inside a web application. In this paper, we establish the first explicit notion of user sub-origins to defeat such attempts. Based on this notion, we propose a new solution called UserPath to establish an end-to-end trusted path between web application users and web servers. To evaluate our solution, we implement a prototype in Chromium, and retrofit it to 20 popular web applications. UserPath reduces the size of client-side TCB that has access to user-owned resources by 8x to 264x, with small developer effort.

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Budianto, E., Jia, Y., Dong, X., Saxena, P., Liang, Z. (2014). You Can’t Be Me: Enabling Trusted Paths and User Sub-origins in Web Browsers. In: Stavrou, A., Bos, H., Portokalidis, G. (eds) Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses. RAID 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8688. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11379-1_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11379-1_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-11378-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-11379-1

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