Secure Web Browsing with the OP Web Browser

Abstract

Current Web browsers are plagued with vulnerabilities, providing hackers with easy access to computer systems via browser-based attacks. Browser security efforts that retrofit existing browsers have had limited success because the design of modern browsers is fundamentally flawed. To enable more secure web browsing, we design and implement a new browser, called the OP Web browser, that attempts to improve the state-of-the-art in browser security. Our overall design approach is to combine operating system design principles with formal methods to design a more secure Web browser by drawing on the expertise of both communities. Our overall design philosophy is to partition the browser into smaller subsystems and make all communication between subsystems simple and explicit. At the core of our design is a small browser kernel that manages the browser subsystems and interposes on all communications between them to enforce our new browser security features. To show the utility of our browser architecture, we design and implement three novel security features. First, we develop novel and flexible security policies that allows us to include plugins within our security framework. Our policy removes the burden of security from plugin writers, and gives plugins the flexibility to use innovative network architectures to deliver content while still maintaining the confidentiality and integrity of our browser, even if attackers compromise the plugin. Second, we use formal methods to prove that the address bar displayed within our browser user interface always shows the correct address for the current Web page. Third, we design and implement a browser-level information-flow tracking system to enable post-mortem analysis of browser-based attacks. If an attacker is able to compromise our browser, we highlight the subset of total activity that is causally related to the attack, thus allowing users and system administrators to determine easily which Web site lead to the compromise and to assess the damage of a successful attack. To evaluate our design, we implemented OP and tested both performance and filesystem impact. To test performance, we measure latency to verify OP's performance penalty from security features are be minimal from a users perspective. Our experiments show that on average the speed of the OP browser is comparable to Firefox and the audit log occupies around 80 KB per page on average.