Stefano Calzavara (Università Ca' Foscari Venezia), Tobias Urban (Institute for Internet Security and Ruhr University Bochum), Dennis Tatang (Ruhr University Bochum), Marius Steffens (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Ben Stock (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security)

Over the years, browsers have adopted an ever-increasing number of client-enforced security policies deployed by means of HTTP headers. Such mechanisms are fundamental for web application security, and usually deployed on a per-page basis. This, however, enables inconsistencies, as different pages within the same security boundaries (in form of origins or sites) can express conflicting security requirements. In this paper, we formalize inconsistencies for cookie security attributes, CSP, and HSTS, and then quantify the magnitude and impact of inconsistencies at scale by crawling 15,000 popular sites. We show numerous sites endanger their own security by omission or misconfiguration of the aforementioned mechanisms, which lead to unnecessary exposure to XSS, cookie theft and HSTS deactivation. We then use our data to analyse to which extent the recent *Origin Policy* proposal can fix the problem of inconsistencies. Unfortunately, we conclude that the current Origin Policy design suffers from major shortcomings which limit its practical applicability to address security inconsistencies, while catering to the need of real-world sites. Based on these insights, we propose Site Policy, an extension of Origin Policy designed to overcome the shortcomings of Origin Policy and to make any insecurity explicit.

View More Papers

V2X Security: Status and Open Challenges

Jonathan Petit (Director Of Engineering at Qualcomm Technologies) Dr. Jonathan Petit is Director of Engineering at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., where he leads research in security of connected and automated vehicles (CAV). His team works on designing security solutions, but also develops tools for automotive penetration testing and builds prototypes. His recent work on misbehavior protection…

Read More

Demo #7: Automated Tracking System For LiDAR Spoofing Attacks...

Yulong Cao, Jiaxiang Ma, Kevin Fu (University of Michigan), Sara Rampazzi (University of Florida), and Z. Morley Mao (University of Michigan) Best Demo Award Runner-up ($200 cash prize)!

Read More

WATSON: Abstracting Behaviors from Audit Logs via Aggregation of...

Jun Zeng (National University of Singapore), Zheng Leong Chua (Independent Researcher), Yinfang Chen (National University of Singapore), Kaihang Ji (National University of Singapore), Zhenkai Liang (National University of Singapore), Jian Mao (Beihang University)

Read More

OblivSketch: Oblivious Network Measurement as a Cloud Service

Shangqi Lai (Monash University), Xingliang Yuan (Monash University), Joseph K. Liu (Monash University), Xun Yi (RMIT University), Qi Li (Tsinghua University), Dongxi Liu (Data61, CSIRO), Surya Nepal (Data61, CSIRO)

Read More