27/11/2013 – Talk by Stefano Calzavara

Title:  Formalizing and Enforcing Web Session Integrity
Time: 11:00
Location: Meeting room
Type: Research Result
Speaker: Stefano Calzavara
Abstract:
Enforcing protection at the browser side has recently become a popular approach for securing web authentication, even when web application developers do not follow recommended security guidelines. Though interesting, existing attempts in the literature only address specific classes of attacks, and thus fall short of providing robust foundations to reason on web authentication security. In this talk we provide such foundations, by introducing a novel notion of web session integrity, which allows us to capture many existing attacks and spot some new ones. We then discuss FF+, a security-enhanced model of a web browser that provides a full-fledged and provably sound enforcement of web session integrity. We leverage our theory to develop SessInt, a prototype extension for Google Chrome implementing the security mechanisms formalized in FF+.   SessInt provides a level of security very close to FF+, while keeping an eye at usability and user experience.