Ilkan Esiyok (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Pascal Berrang (University of Birmingham & Nimiq), Katriel Cohn-Gordon (Meta), Robert Künnemann (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security)

The Internet is a major distribution platform for web applications, but there are no effective transparency and audit mechanisms in place for the web. Due to the ephemeral nature of web applications, a client visiting a website has no guarantee that the code it receives today is the same as yesterday, or the same as other visitors receive. Despite advances in web security, it is thus challenging to audit web applications before they are rendered in the browser. We propose Accountable JS, a browser extension and opt-in protocol for accountable delivery of active content on a web page. We prototype our protocol, formally model its security properties with the Tamarin Prover, and evaluate its compatibility and performance impact with case studies including WhatsApp Web, AdSense and Nimiq. Accountability is beginning to be deployed at scale, with Meta’s recent announcement of Code Verify available to all 2 billion WhatsApp users, but there has been little formal analysis of such protocols. We formally model Code Verify using the Tamarin Prover and compare its properties to our Accountable JS protocol. We also compare Code Verify’s and Accountable JS extension's performance impacts on WhatsApp Web.

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Muslum Ozgur Ozmen (Purdue University), Ruoyu Song (Purdue University), Habiba Farrukh (Purdue University), Z. Berkay Celik (Purdue University)

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Nico Schiller (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Merlin Chlosta (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Moritz Schloegel (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Nils Bars (Ruhr University Bochum), Thorsten Eisenhofer (Ruhr University Bochum), Tobias Scharnowski (Ruhr-University Bochum), Felix Domke (Independent), Lea Schönherr (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Thorsten Holz (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security)

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Akul Goyal (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Xueyuan Han (Wake Forest University), Gang Wang (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Adam Bates (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

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Kaustav Bhattacharjee, Aritra Dasgupta (New Jersey Institute of Technology)

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