Data-Confined HTML5 Applications

Abstract

Rich client-side applications written in HTML5 proliferate diverse platforms such as mobile devices, commodity PCs, and the web platform. These client-side HTML5 applications are increasingly accessing sensitive data, including users' personal and social data, sensor data, and capability-bearing tokens. To fulfill their security and privacy guarantees, these applications need to maintain certain data-confinement invariants. These invariants are not explicitly stated in today's HTML5 applications and are enforced using ad-hoc mechanisms. The complexity of web applications, coupled with hard-to-analyze client-side languages, leads to low-assurance data-confinement mechanisms in which the whole application needs to be in the TCB to ensure data-confinement invariants.We propose a new mechanism called a data-confined sandbox or DCS. A DCS enables complete mediation of communication channels in a high-assurance, small-TCB manner. Our primitive extends currently standardized primitives and has negligible performance overhead and a modest compatibility cost to retrofit into existing applications. We re-implement four real-world HTML5 applications with our proposed design with a small amount of effort, achieving much stronger data-confinement guarantees. We also study over twenty HTML5 applications and find that dataconfinement invariants are implicit in the vast majority of them and crucial to achieving their privacy expectations.

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