Staged information flow for javascript

Modern websites are powered by JavaScript, a flexible dynamic scripting language that executes in client browsers. A common paradigm in such websites is to include third-party JavaScript code in the form of libraries or advertisements. If this code were malicious, it could read sensitive information from the page or write to the location bar, thus redirecting the user to a malicious page, from which the entire machine could be compromised. We present an information-flow based approach for inferring the effects that a piece of JavaScript has on the website in order to ensure that key security properties are not violated. To handle dynamically loaded and generated JavaScript, we propose a framework for staging information flow properties. Our framework propagates information flow through the currently known code in order to compute a minimal set of syntactic residual checks that are performed on the remaining code when it is dynamically loaded. We have implemented a prototype framew...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: PLDI
• Authors: Ravi Chugh, Jeffrey A. Meister, Ranjit Jhala, Sorin Lerner
• Keywords: Information flow, Javascript, PLDI 2009, Programming Languages, Third-party Javascript Code