An Analysis of Scripting Languages for Research in Applied Computing

There are several scripting languages that exist today. However, some are used more frequently and popular than others. This is due to certain characteristics and features that they possess. Particularly in applied computing fields like software engineering, bioinformatics and computational biology, scripting languages are gaining popularity. This paper presents a comparative study of ten popular scripting languages that are used in the above mentioned fields/area. For making comparison, we have identified the factors against which these languages are evaluated. Accordingly, based on selected criteria we determine their suitability in the fields of software engineering, bioinformatics and computational biology research. This will serve as a guide to researchers to choose the appropriate scripting language in the various fields

Cybersecurity Education and Formal Methods

Formal methods have been largely thought of in the context of safety-critical systems, where they have achieved major acceptance. Tens of millions of people trust their lives every day to such systems, based on formal proofs rather than "we haven’t found a bug" (yet!); but why is "we haven’t found a bug" an acceptable basis for systems trusted with hundreds of millions of people’s personal data?This paper looks at some of these issues in cybersecurity, and the extent to which formal methods, ranging from "fully verified" to better tool support, could help. More importantly, recent policy reports and curricula initiatives appear to recommended formal methods in the limited context of "safety critical applications"; we suggest this is too limited in scope and ambition. Not only are formal methods needed in cybersecurity, the repeated and very public weaknesses of the cybersecurity industry provide a powerful motivation for formal methods

Fine-Grained Access Control for HTML5-Based Mobile Applications in Android

HTML5-based mobile applications are becoming more and more popular because they can run on different platforms. Several newly introduced mobile OS natively support HTML5-based applications. For those that do not provide native sup-port, such as Android, iOS, and Windows Phone, developers can develop HTML5-based applications using middlewares, such as PhoneGap [17]. In these platforms, programs are loaded into a web component, called WebView, which can render HTML5 pages and execute JavaScript code. In order for the program to access the system resources, which are isolated from the content inside WebView due to its sand-box, bridges need to be built between JavaScript and the native code (e.g. Java code in Android). Unfortunately, such bridges break the existing protection that was origi-nally built into WebView. In this paper, we study the potential risks of HTML5-based applications, and investigate how the existing mobile systems ’ access control supports these applications. We fo-cus on Android and the PhoneGap middleware. However, our ideas can be applied to other platforms. Our studies indicate that Android does not provide an adequate access control for this kind of applications. We propose a fine-grained access control mechanism for the bridge in Android system. We have implemented our scheme in Android and have evaluated its effectiveness and performance. 1

Isolating JavaScript with Filters, Rewriting, and Wrappers

Abstract. We study methods that allow web sites to safely combine JavaScript from untrusted sources. If implemented properly, filters can prevent dangerous code from loading into the execution environment, while rewriting allows greater expressiveness by inserting run-time checks. Wrapping properties of the execution environment can prevent misuse without requiring changes to imported JavaScript. Using a formal semantics for the ECMA 262-3 standard language, we prove security properties of a subset of JavaScript, comparable in expressiveness to Facebook FBJS, obtained by combining three isolation mechanisms. The isolation guarantees of the three mechanisms are interdependent, with rewriting and wrapper functions relying on the absence of JavaScript constructs eliminated by language filters.

Between Worlds: Securing Mixed JavaScript/ActionScript Multi-Party Web Content

Mixed Flash and JavaScript content has become increasingly prevalent; its purveyance of dynamic features unique to each platform has popularized it for myriad Web development projects. Although Flash and JavaScript security has been examined extensively, the security of untrusted content that combines both has received considerably less attention. This article considers this fusion in detail, outlining several practical scenarios that threaten the security of Web applications. The severity of these attacks warrants the development of new techniques that address the security of Flash-JavaScript content considered as a whole, in contrast to prior solutions that have examined Flash or JavaScript security individually. Toward this end, the article presents FlashJaX, a cross-platform solution that enforces fine-grained, history-based policies that span both Flash and JavaScript. Using in-lined reference monitoring, FlashJaX safely embeds untrusted JavaScript and Flash content in Web pages without modifying browser clients or using special plug-ins. The architecture of FlashJaX, its design and implementation, and a detailed security analysis are exposited. Experiments with advertisements from popular ad networks demonstrate that FlashJaX is transparent to policy-compliant advertisement content, yet blocks many common attack vectors that exploit the fusion of these Web platforms