WebPol: Fine-grained Information Flow Policies for Web Browsers

TL;DR

WebPol introduces fine-grained, JavaScript-based policies for web browsers to better control third-party script access to confidential data, addressing limitations of existing coarse security mechanisms.

Contribution

It presents a novel policy mechanism allowing developers to specify detailed data access rules for third-party scripts within web pages.

Findings

Policies can be enforced with existing information flow tracking proposals.

WebPol's implementation demonstrates manageable performance overhead.

Fine-grained policies improve data security in web browsers.

Abstract

In the standard web browser programming model, third-party scripts included in an application execute with the same privilege as the application's own code. This leaves the application's confidential data vulnerable to theft and leakage by malicious code and inadvertent bugs in the third-party scripts. Security mechanisms in modern browsers (the same-origin policy, cross-origin resource sharing and content security policies) are too coarse to suit this programming model. All these mechanisms (and their extensions) describe whether or not a script can access certain data, whereas the meaningful requirement is to allow untrusted scripts access to confidential data that they need and to prevent the scripts from leaking data on the side. Motivated by this gap, we propose WebPol, a policy mechanism that allows a website developer to include fine-grained policies on confidential application data in the familiar syntax of the JavaScript programming language. The policies can be associated with any webpage element, and specify what aspects of the element can be accessed by which third-party domains. A script can access data that the policy allows it to, but it cannot pass the data (or data derived from it) to other scripts or remote hosts in contravention of the policy. To specify the policies, we expose a small set of new native APIs in JavaScript. Our policies can be enforced using any of the numerous existing proposals for information flow tracking in web browsers. We have integrated our policies into one such proposal that we use to evaluate performance overheads and to test our examples.