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FlowFox: A web browser with flexible and precise information flow control

  • KU Leuven

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

123 Scopus citations

Abstract

We present FlowFox, the first fully functional web browser that implements a precise and general information flow control mechanism for web scripts based on the technique of secure multi-execution. We demonstrate how FlowFox subsumes many ad-hoc script containment countermeasures developed over the last years. We also show that FlowFox is compatible with the current web, by investigating its behavior on the Alexa top-500 web sites, many of which make intricate use of JavaScript. The performance and memory cost of FlowFox is substantial (a performance cost of around 20% on macro benchmarks for a simple two level policy), but not prohibitive. Our prototype implementation shows that information flow enforcement based on secure multi-execution can be implemented in full-scale browsers. It can support powerful, yet precise policies refining the same-origin-policy in a way that is compatible with existing websites.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCCS'12 - Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
Pages748-759
Number of pages12
DOIs
StatePublished - 2012
Event2012 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2012 - Raleigh, NC, United States
Duration: Oct 16 2012Oct 18 2012

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
ISSN (Print)1543-7221

Conference

Conference2012 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2012
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityRaleigh, NC
Period10/16/1210/18/12

Keywords

  • Information flow
  • Web browser architecture
  • Web security

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