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Types and Access Controls for Cross-Domain Security in Flash

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Programming Languages and Systems (APLAS 2012)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 7705))

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Abstract

The ubiquitous Flash platform enables programmers to build sophisticated web application “mash-ups” that combine Flash executables loaded from multiple trust domains with complex, asymmetric trust relationships. Flash provides APIs and run-time checks to help programmers declare and enforce trust relationships between different domains, but there is currently no formal security model for Flash.

This paper presents the first formal security model for the Flash platform. Our formal model instantly reveals that the run-time checks performed by the Flash runtime are not sufficient to enforce data integrity – we present simple example programs that are vulnerable to attacks. We then develop a static type system for Flash programs that lets programmers specify fine-grained trust relationships, and we show that, combined with the run-time checks already performed by the Flash runtime, well-typed programs cannot violate data integrity at run-time.

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References

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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Rastogi, A., Chaudhuri, A., Johnson, R. (2012). Types and Access Controls for Cross-Domain Security in Flash. In: Jhala, R., Igarashi, A. (eds) Programming Languages and Systems. APLAS 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7705. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35182-2_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35182-2_7

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-35181-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-35182-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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