JSFlow: Tracking Information Flow in JavaScript and its APIs
Paper in proceeding, 2014

JavaScript drives the evolution of the web into a powerful application platform. Increasingly, web applications combine services from different providers. The script inclusion mechanism routinely turns barebone web pages into full-fledged services built up from third-party code. Such code provides a range of facilities from helper utilities (such as jQuery) to readily available services (such as Google Analytics and Tynt). Script inclusion poses a challenge of ensuring that the integrated third-party code respects security and privacy. This paper presents JSFlow, a security-enhanced JavaScript interpreter for fine-grained tracking of information flow. We show how to resolve practical challenges for enforcing information-flow policies for the full JavaScript language, as well as tracking information in the presence of libraries, as provided by browser APIs. The interpreter is itself written in JavaScript, which enables deployment as a browser extension. Our experiments with the extension provide in-depth understanding of information manipulation by third-party scripts such as Google Analytics. We find that different sites intended to provide similar services effectuate rather different security policies for the user's sensitive information: some ensure it does not leave the browser, others share it with the originating server, while yet others freely propagate it to third parties. Copyright 2014 ACM.

Author

Daniel Hedin

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Software Technology (Chalmers)

Luciano Bello

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Software Technology (Chalmers)

Andrei Sabelfeld

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Software Technology (Chalmers)

Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC)

1663-1671
9781450324694 (ISBN)

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Subject Categories

Computer and Information Science

Roots

Basic sciences

DOI

10.1145/2554850.2554909

ISBN

9781450324694

More information

Created

10/7/2017