Team for Research in
Ubiquitous Secure Technology

Citation
Lin-Shung Huang, Eric Chen, Adam Barth, Eric Rescoria, Collin Jackson. "Talking to Yourself for Fun and Profit". Web 2.0 Security and Privacy (W2SP 2011), 2011.

Abstract
Browsers limit how web sites can access the network. Historically, the web platform has limited web sites to HTTP, but HTTP is inefficient for a number of applications—including chat and multiplayer games—for which raw socket access is more appropriate. Java, Flash Player, and HTML5 provide socket APIs to web sites, but we discover, and experimentally verify, attacks that exploit the interaction between these APIs and transparent proxies. At a cost of less than $1 per exploitation, our attacks poison the proxy’s cache, causing all clients of the proxy to receive malicious content supplied by the attacker. We then propose a modification of the HTML5 WebSocket protocol that resists these (and other) attacks. The WebSocket working group has adopted a variant of our proposal.

Electronic downloads

• websocket.pdf · application/pdf · 426 kbytes

• HTML

  Lin-Shung Huang, Eric Chen, Adam Barth, Eric Rescoria,
  Collin Jackson. <a
  href="http://www.truststc.org/pubs/840.html"
  >Talking to Yourself for Fun and Profit</a>, Web
  2.0 Security and Privacy (W2SP 2011), 2011.

• Plain text

  Lin-Shung Huang, Eric Chen, Adam Barth, Eric Rescoria,
  Collin Jackson. "Talking to Yourself for Fun and
  Profit". Web 2.0 Security and Privacy (W2SP 2011), 2011.

• BibTeX

  @inproceedings{HuangChenBarthRescoriaJackson11_TalkingToYourselfForFunProfit,
      author = {Lin-Shung Huang and Eric Chen and Adam Barth and
                Eric Rescoria and Collin Jackson},
      title = {Talking to Yourself for Fun and Profit},
      booktitle = {Web 2.0 Security and Privacy (W2SP 2011)},
      year = {2011},
      abstract = {Browsers limit how web sites can access the
                network. Historically, the web platform has
                limited web sites to HTTP, but HTTP is inefficient
                for a number of applications—including chat and
                multiplayer games—for which raw socket access is
                more appropriate. Java, Flash Player, and HTML5
                provide socket APIs to web sites, but we discover,
                and experimentally verify, attacks that exploit
                the interaction between these APIs and transparent
                proxies. At a cost of less than $1 per
                exploitation, our attacks poison the proxy’s
                cache, causing all clients of the proxy to receive
                malicious content supplied by the attacker. We
                then propose a modification of the HTML5 WebSocket
                protocol that resists these (and other) attacks.
                The WebSocket working group has adopted a variant
                of our proposal. },
      URL = {http://www.truststc.org/pubs/840.html}
  }
  

Posted by Mary Stewart on 4 Apr 2012.
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