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An architecture for enforcing end-to-end access control over web applications

Published: 11 June 2010 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    The web is now being used as a general platform for hosting distributed applications like wikis, bulletin board messaging systems and collaborative editing environments. Data from multiple applications originating at multiple sources all intermix in a single web browser, making sensitive data stored in the browser subject to a broad milieu of attacks (cross-site scripting, cross-site request forgery and others). The fundamental problem is that existing web infrastructure provides no means for enforcing end-to-end security on data. To solve this we design an architecture using mandatory access control (MAC) enforcement. We overcome the limitations of traditional MAC systems, implemented solely at the operating system layer, by unifying MAC enforcement across virtual machine, operating system, networking and application layers. We implement our architecture using Xen virtual machine management, SELinux at the operating system layer, labeled IPsec for networking and our own label-enforcing web browser, called FlowwolF. We tested our implementation and find that it performs well, supporting data intermixing while still providing end-to-end security guarantees.

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        SACMAT '10: Proceedings of the 15th ACM symposium on Access control models and technologies
        June 2010
        212 pages
        ISBN:9781450300490
        DOI:10.1145/1809842
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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        Publication History

        Published: 11 June 2010

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        Author Tags

        1. access control
        2. policy compliance

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        View all
        • (2021)SCIFFS: Enabling Secure Third-Party Security Analytics using Serverless ComputingProceedings of the 26th ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies10.1145/3450569.3463567(175-186)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2021
        • (2018)Data Usage Control for Distributed SystemsACM Transactions on Privacy and Security10.1145/318334221:3(1-32)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2018
        • (2016)Leveraging Data Provenance to Enhance Cyber Resilience2016 IEEE Cybersecurity Development (SecDev)10.1109/SecDev.2016.034(107-114)Online publication date: Nov-2016
        • (2016)An Identity and Access Management approach for SOA2016 IEEE International Symposium on Signal Processing and Information Technology (ISSPIT)10.1109/ISSPIT.2016.7886021(126-131)Online publication date: Dec-2016
        • (2016)Identifying Extension-Based Ad Injection via Fine-Grained Web Content ProvenanceResearch in Attacks, Intrusions, and Defenses10.1007/978-3-319-45719-2_19(415-436)Online publication date: 7-Sep-2016
        • (2014)Content-Based Access Control: Use data content to assist access control for large-scale content-centric databases2014 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data)10.1109/BigData.2014.7004294(701-710)Online publication date: Oct-2014
        • (2013)Auto-FBIProceedings of the 29th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference10.1145/2523649.2523683(349-358)Online publication date: 9-Dec-2013
        • (2013)Protecting sensitive web content from client-side vulnerabilities with CRYPTONSProceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGSAC conference on Computer & communications security10.1145/2508859.2516743(1311-1324)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2013
        • (2013)Mandatory Access Protection Within Cloud SystemsSecurity, Privacy and Trust in Cloud Systems10.1007/978-3-642-38586-5_5(145-173)Online publication date: 4-Sep-2013
        • (2013)Smart Resource Allocation to Improve Cloud SecuritySecurity, Privacy and Trust in Cloud Systems10.1007/978-3-642-38586-5_4(103-143)Online publication date: 4-Sep-2013
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