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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Ehsan Toreini, Dr Maryam Mehrnezhad, Professor Feng Hao
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
In this paper, we address an unsolved problem in the real world: how to ensure the integrity of the web content in a browser in the presence of malicious browser extensions? The problem of exposing confidential user credentials to malicious extensions has been widely understood, which has prompted major banks to deploy two-factor authentication. However, the importance of the “integrity” of the web content has received little attention. We implement two attacks on real-world online banking websites and show that ignoring the “integrity” of the web content can fundamentally defeat two-factor solutions. To address this problem, we propose a cryptographic protocol called DOMtegrity to ensure the end-to-end integrity of the DOM structure of a web page from delivering at a web server to the rendering of the page in the user’s browser. DOMtegrity is the first solution that protects DOM integrity without modifying the browser architecture or requiring extra hardware. It works by exploiting subtle yet important differences between browser extensions and in-line JavaScript code. We show how DOMtegrity prevents the earlier attacks and a whole range of man-in-the-browser attacks. We conduct extensive experiments on more than 14,000 real-world extensions to evaluate the effectiveness
Author(s): Toreini E, Shahandashti SF, Mehrnezhad M, Hao F
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: International Journal of Information Security
Year: 2019
Volume: 18
Pages: 801-814
Print publication date: 01/12/2019
Online publication date: 11/06/2019
Acceptance date: 11/06/2019
Date deposited: 12/06/2019
ISSN (print): 1615-5262
ISSN (electronic): 1615-5270
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10207-019-00442-1
DOI: 10.1007/s10207-019-00442-1
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