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Exploiting split browsers for efficiently protecting user data

Published: 19 October 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Offloading complex tasks to a resource-abundant environment like the cloud, can extend the capabilities of resource constrained mobile devices, extend battery life, and improve user experience. Split browsing is a new paradigm that adopts this strategy to improve web browsing on devices like smartphones and tablets. Split browsers offload computation to the cloud by design; they are composed by two parts, one running on the thin client and one in the cloud. Rendering takes place primarily in the latter, while a bitmap or a simplified web page is communicated to the client. Despite its difference with traditional web browsing, split browsing still suffers from the same types of threats, such as cross-site scripting. In this paper, we propose exploiting the design of split browsers to also utilize cloud resources for protecting against various threats efficiently. We begin by systematically studying split browsing architectures, and then proceed to propose two solutions, in parallel and inline cloning, that exploit the inherent features of this new browsing paradigm to accurately and efficiently protect user data against common web exploits. Our preliminary results suggest that our framework can be efficiently applied to Amazon's Silk, the most widely deployed at the time of writing, split browser.

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  • (2019)Analysis of software vulnerability classification based on different technical parametersInformation Security Journal: A Global Perspective10.1080/19393555.2019.162832528:1-2(1-19)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2019
  • (2015)Love All, Trust FewProceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Middleboxes and Network Function Virtualization10.1145/2785989.2785990(1-6)Online publication date: 21-Aug-2015
  • (2015)Safe Internet Browsing Using a Transparent Virtual BrowserProceedings of the 2015 IEEE 2nd International Conference on Cyber Security and Cloud Computing (CSCloud)10.1109/CSCloud.2015.58(423-432)Online publication date: 3-Nov-2015

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CCSW '12: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Workshop on Cloud computing security workshop
      October 2012
      134 pages
      ISBN:9781450316651
      DOI:10.1145/2381913
      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: 19 October 2012

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      Author Tags

      1. cloud
      2. cross-site scripting
      3. data protection
      4. information flow tracking
      5. split browser architectures

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      CCS'12: the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
      October 19, 2012
      North Carolina, Raleigh, USA

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      View all
      • (2019)Analysis of software vulnerability classification based on different technical parametersInformation Security Journal: A Global Perspective10.1080/19393555.2019.162832528:1-2(1-19)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2019
      • (2015)Love All, Trust FewProceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Middleboxes and Network Function Virtualization10.1145/2785989.2785990(1-6)Online publication date: 21-Aug-2015
      • (2015)Safe Internet Browsing Using a Transparent Virtual BrowserProceedings of the 2015 IEEE 2nd International Conference on Cyber Security and Cloud Computing (CSCloud)10.1109/CSCloud.2015.58(423-432)Online publication date: 3-Nov-2015

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