SaTC: CORE: Medium: Towards a Usable, Practical, and Provably Secure Browser Infrastructure

Web浏览器已经成为与购物、银行和医疗保健等服务交互的主要软件平台。支持这些应用程序的许多相同技术，如第三方JavaScript和浏览器扩展，也会产生意想不到的影响，使用户的私人信息容易被窃取或滥用。现有的安全策略和机制——如同源策略（SOP）、内容安全策略（CSP）和扩展权限系统——粒度太粗，不足以保护用户的数据。先前的工作提出了信息流控制（IFC）作为解决方案。然而，现有的IFC解决方案还不实用：它们存在可用性差的问题，并且难以与保护部分web应用程序或浏览器状态的其他强制机制进行互操作。这个项目的目标是构建一个实用的、可用的和安全的浏览器基础设施。该项目将使用组合原则为可证明安全的浏览器基础设施开发一个模块化模型。该模型将通过具体的执行机制实例化，以开发满足当前浏览器平台功能标准的浏览器。项目的一个重要部分是了解用户对安全目标的看法和期望；根据用户数据提取切实可行的IFC政策；并建立帮助用户安全浏览网络的机制。最后，该项目将开发测试和验证基准，并使用这些基准来比较不同执行机制的有效性和成本。该项目的成果将为构建内置信息流安全的实用web浏览器奠定基础。这个项目的目标是人们每天都在使用的技术，它不仅可以帮助web应用程序开发人员，还可以帮助所有web用户。

Web browsers have become the predominant software platform for interacting with services such as shopping, banking, and health care. Many of the same technologies that enable these applications, such as third-party JavaScript and browser extensions, also have the unintended effect of making users' private information vulnerable to theft or misuse. Existing security policies and mechanisms---such as the same origin policy (SOP), the content security policy (CSP), and permission systems for extensions---are too coarse grained and not sufficient to protect users' data. Prior work has proposed information flow control (IFC) as a solution. However, existing IFC solutions are not yet practical: they suffer from poor usability and struggle to interoperate with other enforcement mechanisms that protect parts of web applications or browser state. The goal of this project is to construct a practical, usable, and secure browser infrastructure.The project will develop a modular model for a provably secure browser infrastructure using compositional principles. This model will be instantiated with concrete enforcement mechanisms to develop a browser that meets the functionality standards of current browser platforms. An important part of the project is to understand users' perceptions and expectations with respect to security goals; to extract practical IFC policies based on user data; and to build mechanisms that help users safely navigate the web. Finally, the project will develop testing and validation benchmarks and use these benchmarks to compare the effectiveness and the cost of different enforcement mechanisms. The results of this project will lay the foundation for building practical web browsers that have information flow security built in. This project targets technology that people use every day and has the potential to help not only web application developers but all web users.