Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Announcing "Browser Security Handbook"



Many people view the task of writing secure web applications as a very complex challenge - in part because of the inherent shortcomings of technologies such as HTTP, HTML, or Javascript, and in part because of the subtle differences and unexpected interactions between various browser security mechanisms.

Through the years, we found that having a full understanding of browser-specific quirks is critical to making sound security design decisions in modern Web 2.0 applications. For example, the same user-supplied link may appear to one browser as a harmless relative address, while another could interpret it as a potentially malicious Javascript payload. In another case, an application may rely on a particular HTTP request that is impossible to spoof from within the browser in order to defend the security of its users. However, an attacker might easily subvert the safeguard by crafting the same request from within commonly installed browser extensions. If not accounted for, these differences can lead to trouble.

In hopes of helping to make the Web a safer place, we decided to release our Browser Security Handbook to the general public. This 60-page document provides a comprehensive comparison of a broad set of security features and characteristics in commonly used browsers, along with (hopefully) useful commentary and implementation tips for application developers who need to rely on these mechanisms, as well as engineering teams working on future browser-side security enhancements.

Please note that given the sheer number of characteristics covered, we expect some kinks in the initial version of the handbook; feedback from browser vendors and security researchers is greatly appreciated.

Monday, December 8, 2008

Native Client: A Technology for Running Native Code on the Web



Most native applications can access everything on your computer – including your files. This access means that you have to make decisions about which apps you trust enough to install, because a malicious or buggy application might harm your machine. Here at Google we believe you shouldn't have to choose between powerful applications and security. That's why we're working on Native Client, a technology that seeks to give Web developers the opportunity to make safer and more dynamic applications that can run on any OS and any browser. Today, we're sharing our technology with the research and security communities for their feedback to help make this technology more useful and more secure.

Our approach is built around a software containment system called the inner-sandbox that is designed to prevent unintended interactions between a native code module and the host system. The inner-sandbox uses static analysis to detect security defects in untrusted x86 code. Previously, such analysis has been challenging due to such practices as self-modifying code and overlapping instructions. In our work, we disallow such practices through a set of alignment and structural rules that, when observed, enable the native code module to be disassembled reliably and all reachable instructions to be identified during disassembly. With reliable disassembly as a tool, it's then feasible for the validator to determine whether the executable includes unsafe x86 instructions. For example, the validator can determine whether the executable includes instructions that directly invoke the operating system that could read or write files or subvert the containment system itself.

To learn more and help test Native Client, check out our post on the Google Code blog as well as our developer site. Our developer site includes our research paper and of course the source for the project under the BSD license.

We look forward to hearing what you think!

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

User Experience in the Identity Community

Eric Sachs & Ben Laurie, Google Security

One of the major conferences on Internet identity standards is the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW), a semiannual 'un-conference' where the sessions are not determined ahead of time. It is attended by a large set of people who work on Internet security and identity standards such as OAuth, OpenID, SAML, InfoCards, etc.  A major theme within the identity community this year has been about improving the user experience and growing the adoption of these technologies.  The OpenID community is making great progress on user experience, with Yahoo, AOL, and Google quickly improving the support they provide (read a summary from Joseph Smarr of Plaxo).  Similarly, the InfoCard community has been working on simplifying the user experience of InfoCard technology, including the updated CardSpace selector from Microsoft.

Another hot topic at IIW centered around how to improve the user experience when testing alternatives and enhancements to passwords to make them less susceptible to phishing attacks.  Many websites and enterprises have tried these password enhancements/alternatives, but they found that people complained that they were hard to use, or that they weren't portable enough for people who use multiple computers, including web cafes and smart phones.  We have published an article summarizing some of the community's current ideas for how to deploy these new authentication mechanisms using a multi-layered approach that minimizes additional work required by users.  We have also pulled together a set of videos showing how a number of these different approaches work with both web-based and desktop applications.  We hope this information will be helpful to other websites and enterprises who are concerned about phishing.