Rethinking Security of Web-Based System Applications

摘要: Many modern desktop and mobile platforms, including Ubuntu, Google Chrome, Windows, Firefox OS, support so called Web-based system applications that run outside the Web browser enjoy direct access to native objects such as files, camera, geolocation. We show access-control models of these platforms are (a) incompatible (b) prone unintended delegation native-access rights: when request for their own code, they unintentionally enable it untrusted third-party too. This enables malicious ads other content steal users' OAuth authentication credentials, camera on devices, etc. then design, implement, evaluate PowerGate, a new mechanism applications. It solves two key problems plaguing all existing platforms: security consistency. First, unlike PowerGate correctly protects from unauthorized access. Second, provides uniform semantics across is 100% backward compatible. application developers write well-defined native-object policies with explicit principals "application's local code" "third-party code," easy configure, incurs negligible performance overhead.