You Can't Touch This

Presented as part of the 2013 HCSS conference.

ABSTRACT

JavaScript provides access to all resources via object properties. An access control mechanism that protects confidential information for such a language has to gauge traversals of the object graph. We propose a domain specific language to specify sets of objects, assign read and write permissions to them, and enforce these permissions in limited scopes of a program. To obtain complete interposition, we build the enforcement mechanism into the scripting engine.

Concretely, we are working on an implementation of the enforce- ment mechanism in Firefox. To establish a sustainable implementation, our design goal is to construct a minimal extension of the Firefox en- gine that collaborates with a JavaScript library that implements the less critical parts of the enforcement.

∗ geffken@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
† thiemann@acm.org