cid 6802b7b2f289954d1265023c351372c021d777c661c743a60ebd2b8e57d39f0b · original · via openalex
Title: VEX: vetting browser extensions for security vulnerabilities Authors: Sruthi Bandhakavi; Samuel Talmadge King; P. Madhusudan; Marianne Winslett Venue: Year: 2010 Canonical: openalex:https://openalex.org/W1887482550 URL: https://openalex.org/W1887482550 Collector: openalex OA: false ABSTRACT The browser has become the de facto platform for everyday computation. Among the many potential attacks that target or exploit browsers, vulnerabilities in browser extensions have received relatively little attention. Currently, extensions are vetted by manual inspection, which does not scale well and is subject to human error. In this paper, we present VEX, a framework for highlighting potential security vulnerabilities in browser extensions by applying static information-flow analysis to the JavaScript code used to implement extensions. We describe several patterns of flows as well as unsafe programming practices that may lead to privilege escalations in Firefox extensions. VEX analyzes Firefox extensions for such flow patterns using high-precision, context-sensitive, flow-sensitive static analysis. We analyze thousands of browser extensions, and VEX finds six exploitable vulnerabilities, three of which were previously unknown. VEX also finds hundreds of examples of bad programming practices that may lead to security vulnerabilities. We show that compared to current Mozilla extension review tools, VEX greatly reduces the human burden for manually vetting extensions when looking for key types of dangerous flows. 1