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Towards Fine-Grained Access Control on Browser Extensions

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Information Security Practice and Experience (ISPEC 2012)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 7232))

Abstract

We propose a practical and fine-grained browser extension access control framework, which regulates the misbehavior of JSEs with malicious intent at run time by means of restricting the access to resources, in order to prevent the malicious JSEs from ruining users security. The resource access of a JSE, which constrains its behavior, is the basis of the functionalities of it. Instead of the conventional static access control rules, we formulate the fine-grained access control policies dynamically in the framework while JSEs are executing within Firefox, which makes our framework more flexible and practical in real-world use. We tested 100 popular JSEs on AMO to evaluate the compatibility of our framework, and found that only two of them are not compatible due to their sensitive behavior. To evaluate the capability of restraining the misbehavior of JSEs, we tested ten malicious ones and the results show that all of them are blocked by our framework before they actually misbehave.

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 70890084/G021102, 61003274 and 61003273) and Knowledge Innovation Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. YYYJ-1013).

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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Wang, L., Xiang, J., Jing, J., Zhang, L. (2012). Towards Fine-Grained Access Control on Browser Extensions. In: Ryan, M.D., Smyth, B., Wang, G. (eds) Information Security Practice and Experience. ISPEC 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7232. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29101-2_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29101-2_11

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-29100-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-29101-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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