Tracking Information Flow in Dynamic Tree Structures

Paper in proceeding, 2009

This paper explores the problem of tracking information flow in dynamic tree structures. Motivated by the problem of manipulating the Document Object Model (DOM) trees by browser-run client-side scripts, we address the dynamic nature of interactions via tree structures.We present a runtime enforcement mechanism that monitors this interaction and prevents a range of attacks, some of them missed by previous approaches, that exploit the tree structure in order to transfer sensitive information. We formalize our approach for a simple language with DOM-like tree operations and show that the monitor prevents scripts from disclosing secrets.