How to design browser security and privacy alerts

Browser security and privacy alerts must be designed to ensure they are of value to the end-user, and communicate risks efficiently. We performed a systematic literature review, producing a list of guidelines from the research. Papers were analysed quantitatively and qualitatively to formulate a comprehensive set of guidelines. Our findings seek to provide developers and designers with guidance as to how to construct security and privacy alerts. We conclude by providing an alert template, highlighting its adherence to the derived guidelines

AdSplit: Separating smartphone advertising from applications

A wide variety of smartphone applications today rely on third-party advertising services, which provide libraries that are linked into the hosting application. This situation is undesirable for both the application author and the advertiser. Advertising libraries require additional permissions, resulting in additional permission requests to users. Likewise, a malicious application could simulate the behavior of the advertising library, forging the user's interaction and effectively stealing money from the advertiser. This paper describes AdSplit, where we extended Android to allow an application and its advertising to run as separate processes, under separate user-ids, eliminating the need for applications to request permissions on behalf of their advertising libraries. We also leverage mechanisms from Quire to allow the remote server to validate the authenticity of client-side behavior. In this paper, we quantify the degree of permission bloat caused by advertising, with a study of thousands of downloaded apps. AdSplit automatically recompiles apps to extract their ad services, and we measure minimal runtime overhead. We also observe that most ad libraries just embed an HTML widget within and describe how AdSplit can be designed with this in mind to avoid any need for ads to have native code

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

A Survey of Techniques for Improving Security of GPUs

Graphics processing unit (GPU), although a powerful performance-booster, also has many security vulnerabilities. Due to these, the GPU can act as a safe-haven for stealthy malware and the weakest `link' in the security `chain'. In this paper, we present a survey of techniques for analyzing and improving GPU security. We classify the works on key attributes to highlight their similarities and differences. More than informing users and researchers about GPU security techniques, this survey aims to increase their awareness about GPU security vulnerabilities and potential countermeasures

Analysis of Mozambican websites : how do they protect their users?

Web security is an important approach for most institutions, organizations and individuals which use or provide their services through websites. In this study, a systematic and methodical evaluation of the exposure of web servers and HTTP security headers to attackers that can cause potential harm was tested in 240 Mozambican websites. Vulnerabilities related to HTTP security headers were obtained and the mechanisms which should be taken to reduce the security risks of the services available on the websites are presented

ADsafety: Type-Based Verification of JavaScript Sandboxing

Web sites routinely incorporate JavaScript programs from several sources into a single page. These sources must be protected from one another, which requires robust sandboxing. The many entry-points of sandboxes and the subtleties of JavaScript demand robust verification of the actual sandbox source. We use a novel type system for JavaScript to encode and verify sandboxing properties. The resulting verifier is lightweight and efficient, and operates on actual source. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique by applying it to ADsafe, which revealed several bugs and other weaknesses.Comment: in Proceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium (2011