Are chrome extensions compliant with the spirit of least privilege?
Journal article, 2022

Extensions are small applications installed by users and enrich the user experience of browsing the Internet. Browsers expose a set of restricted APIs to extensions. To be used, extensions need to list the permissions associated with these APIs in a mandatory extension file named manifest. In particular, Chrome’s permission ecosystem was designed in the spirit of the least privilege. Yet, this paper demonstrates that 39.8% of the analyzed extensions provided by the official Web Store are compliant with the spirit of least privilege. Also, we develop: (1) a browser extension to make aware regular users of the permissions the extensions they install; (2) a web app where extensions developers can check whether their extensions are compliant with the spirit of the least privileged; and (3) a set of scripts that can be part of the vendors’ acceptance criteria such that when developers upload their extensions to the official repositories, the scripts automatically analyze the extensions and generate a report about the permissions and the usage.

Web security

Privacy

Browser extensions

Author

Pablo Picazo-Sanchez

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Information Security

Lara Ortiz-Martin

Gerardo Schneider

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Formal methods

Andrei Sabelfeld

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Information Security

International Journal of Information Security

1615-5262 (ISSN) 1615-5270 (eISSN)

Vol. 21 6 1283-1297

Subject Categories

Media and Communication Technology

Human Computer Interaction

Computer Science

DOI

10.1007/s10207-022-00610-w

More information

Latest update

3/7/2024 9