Information Flow for Web Security and Privacy

The use of libraries is prevalent in modern web development. But how to ensure sensitive data is not being leaked through these libraries? This is the first challenge this thesis aims to solve. We propose the use of information-flow control by developing a principled approach to allow information-flow tracking in libraries, even if the libraries are written in a language not supporting information-flow control. The approach allows library functions to have unlabel\ua0and relabel models that explain how values are unlabeled and relabeled when marshaled between the labeled program and the unlabeled library. The approach handles primitive values and lists, records, higher-order functions, and references through the use of lazy marshaling.Web pages can combine benign properties of a user\u27s browser to a fingerprint, which can identify the user. Fingerprinting can be intrusive and often happens without the user\u27s consent. The second challenge this thesis aims to solve is to bridge the gap between the principled approach of handling libraries, to practical use in the information-flow aware JavaScript interpreter JSFlow. We extend JSFlow to handle libraries and be deployed in a browser, enabling information-flow tracking on web pages to detect fingerprinting.Modern browsers allow for browser modifications through browser\ua0extensions. These extensions can be intrusive by, e.g., blocking content ormodifying the DOM, and it can be in the interest of web pages to detect which extensions are installed in the browser. The third challenge this thesis aims to solve is finding which browser extensions are executing in a user\u27s browser, and investigate how the installed browser extensions can be used to decrease the privacy of users. We do this by conducting several large-scale studies and show that due to added security by browser vendors, a web page may uniquely identify a user based on the installed browser extension alone.It is popular to use filter lists to block unwanted content such as ads and tracking scripts on web pages. These filter lists are usually crowd-sourced andmainly focus on English speaking regions. Non-English speaking regions should use a supplementary filter list, but smaller linguistic regions may not have an up to date filter list. The fourth challenge this thesis aims to solve is how to automatically generate supplementary filter lists for regions which currently do not have an up to date filter list

Declarative Policies for Capability Control

In capability-safe languages, components can access a resource only if they possess a capability for that resource. As a result, a programmer can prevent an untrusted component from accessing a sensitive resource by ensuring that the component never acquires the corresponding capability. In order to reason about which components may use a sensitive resource it is necessary to reason about how capabilities propagate through a system. This may be difficult, or, in the case of dynamically composed code, impossible to do before running the system. To counter this situation, we propose extensions to capability-safe languages that restrict the use of capabilities according to declarative policies. We introduce two independently useful semantic security policies to regulate capabilities and describe language-based mechanisms that enforce them. Access control policies restrict which components may use a capability and are enforced using higher-order contracts. Integrity policies restrict which components may influence (directly or indirectly) the use of a capability and are enforced using an information-flow type system. Finally, we describe how programmers can dynamically and soundly combine components that enforce access control or integrity policies with components that enforce different policies or even no policy at all.Engineering and Applied Science

Helping or Hindering? How Browser Extensions Undermine Security

Browser extensions enhance the functionality of native Web applications on the client side. They provide a rich end-user experience by utilizing feature-rich JavaScript APIs, otherwise inaccessible for native applications. However, prior studies suggest that extensions may degrade the client-side security to execute their operations, such as by altering the DOM, executing untrusted scripts in the applications' context, and performing other security-critical operations for the user. In this study, we instead focus on extensions that tamper with the security headers between the client-server exchange, thereby undermining the security guarantees that these headers provide to the application. To this end, we present our automated analysis framework to detect such extensions by leveraging static and dynamic analysis techniques. We statically identify extensions with the permission to modify headers and then instrument the dangerous APIs to investigate their runtime behavior with respect to modifying headers in-flight. We then use our framework to analyze the three snapshots of the Chrome extension store from Jun 2020, Feb 2021, and Jan 2022. In doing so, we detect 1,129 distinct extensions that interfere with security-related request/response headers and discuss the associated security implications. The impact of our findings is aggravated by the extensions, with millions of installations dropping critical security headers like Content-Security-Policy or X-Frame-Options

InfoTech Update, Volume 9, Number3, May/June 2001

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_news/4986/thumbnail.jp

Investigating Advances in the Acquisition of Secure Systems Based on Open Architecture, Open Source Software, and Software Product Lines

Naval Postgraduate School Acquisition Research Progra

Loyalty, Ideology, and Identification: An Empirical Study of the Attitudes and Behaviors of Passive Users of Open Source Software

Extant research on open source software (OSS) has primarily focused on software developers and active users but has paid limited attention to the less visible “passive” users who form the silent majority of OSS communities. Passive users play a critical role in the adoption and diffusion of OSS, and we need more research to understand their behaviors and motivations. We address this gap by drawing on the sociological theory of community markers. The three community markers in the context of OSS are loyalty, ideology, and identification. We also draw on marketing literature to propose four contributory behaviors of passive users of OSS that we theorize to be impacted by the community markers: user brand-extension, word-of-mouth, endorsement, and community involvement. We further classify passive users’ contributory behaviors according to the difficulty of their enactment and examine the differential influence of the OSS community markers. Partial-least squares (PLS) analyses of data obtained through a survey of passive users of an OSS product provide support for the majority of the hypotheses

Social Media and the Public Sector

{Excerpt} Social media is revolutionizing the way we live, learn, work, and play. Elements of the private sector have begun to thrive on opportunities to forge, build, and deepen relationships. Some are transforming their organizational structures and opening their corporate ecosystems in consequence. The public sector is a relative newcomer. It too can drive stakeholder involvement and satisfaction. Global conversations, especially among Generation Y, were born circa 2004. Beginning 1995 until then, the internet had hosted static, one-way websites. These were places to visit passively, retrieve information from, and perhaps post comments about by electronic mail. Sixteen years later, Web 2.0 enables many-to-many connections in numerous domains of interest and practice, powered by the increasing use of blogs, image and video sharing, mashups, podcasts, ratings, Really Simple Syndication, social bookmarking, tweets, widgets, and wikis, among others. Today, people expect the internet to be user-centric