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COWL: A Confinement System for the Web

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    COWL: A Confinement System for the Web

    COWL
    About

    Modern web applications are conglomerations of JavaScript written by multiple authors: application developers routinely incorporate code from third-party libraries, and mashup applications synthesize data and code hosted at different sites. In current browsers, a web application's developer and user must trust third-party code in libraries not to leak the user's sensitive information from within applications. Even worse, in the status quo, the only way to implement some mashups is for the user to give her login credentials for one site to the operator of another site. Fundamentally, today's browser security model trades privacy for flexibility because it lacks a sufficient mechanism for confining untrusted code once it reads sensitive data.

    COWL (Confinement with Origin Web Labels) is a robust JavaScript confinement system for modern web browsers. COWL introduces label-based mandatory access control to browsing contexts (pages, iframes, etc.) in a way that is fully backward-compatible with legacy web content. With COWL, developers not only can restrict with whom they share data, but also can impose restrictions on how their data is disseminated once it is shared. COWL achieves both flexibility for developers and privacy for users: it allows code to fetch and share data as necessary, but once code has read sensitive data, COWL confines the code by revoking its right to communicate with unauthorized parties.

    Anyone know/heard about this?
    Windows no longer obstructs my view.
    Using Kubuntu Linux since March 23, 2007.
    "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data." - Sherlock Holmes

    #2
    No, but I am interested now that you brought it up.
    Kubuntu 18.04 on AMD

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      #3
      They give an example here: http://cowl.ws/#example

      Note the critical part: the password checker, running at sketchy.ru, must also participate in the system and support receiving labeled contexts. If it doesn't, then the mechanism is effectively subverted. So you can't use COWL to arbitrarily exchange information between any two processes; both processes must recognize and be bound by the contexts.

      Useful idea; difficult to see how it'll become widely used in practice. Proper incentives could accelerate adoption, where "proper incentives" means, of course, cash. $FIRST_PARTY says to $THIRD_PARTY, "I will pay you to implement COWL."

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        #4
        Well we can hope... oracle is worthless on java/js security
        Kubuntu 18.04 on AMD

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