Paper Info
Title
Are chrome extensions compliant with the spirit of least privilege?
Abstract
Extensions are small applications installed by users and enrich the user experience of browsing the Internet. Browsers expose a set of restricted APIs to extensions. To be used, extensions need to list the permissions associated with these APIs in a mandatory extension file named manifest. In particular, Chrome's permission ecosystem was designed in the spirit of the least privilege. Yet, this paper demonstrates that 39.8% of the analyzed extensions provided by the official Web Store are compliant with the spirit of least privilege. Also, we develop: (1) a browser extension to make aware regular users of the permissions the extensions they install; (2) a web app where extensions developers can check whether their extensions are compliant with the spirit of the least privileged; and (3) a set of scripts that can be part of the vendors' acceptance criteria such that when developers upload their extensions to the official repositories, the scripts automatically analyze the extensions and generate a report about the permissions and the usage.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1007/s10207-022-00610-w
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INFORMATION SECURITY
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Browser extensions, Web security, Privacy
Journal
21
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
6
1615-5262
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Pablo Picazo-Sanchez100.68
Lara Ortiz-Martin200.34
Gerardo Schneider300.34
Andrei Sabelfeld42692121.16