• Login
    View Item 
    •   SMARTech Home
    • Georgia Tech Theses and Dissertations
    • Georgia Tech Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
    •   SMARTech Home
    • Georgia Tech Theses and Dissertations
    • Georgia Tech Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Identifying and mitigating threats from embedding third-party content

    Thumbnail
    View/Open
    MENG-DISSERTATION-2017.pdf (1.657Mb)
    Date
    2017-08-02
    Author
    Meng, Wei
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    Abstract
    Embedding content from third parties to enrich features is a common practice in the development of modern web applications and mobile applications. Such practices can pose serious security and privacy threats to an end user, because sensitive data about a user in an application can be directly accessed by third-party content that usually operates with the same privilege as first-party content. The confidentiality and integrity of a user’s indirect data, such as a user profile, may also be compromised by such practices. This dissertation aims to identify new threats posed to end users by the practices of embedding third-party content and develop techniques to mitigate these threats. We first demonstrate how a malicious first-party application can either pollute or infer a user’s in- direct data in a third-party service or application by embedding it, and propose defense techniques to mitigate these two new classes of threats. We then study how over-privileged third-party JavaScript code accesses a user’s direct data in a web application in general through a large-scale measurement. This dissertation also aims to design mechanisms that enable end users and developers to limit the privilege of third-party content to prevent unintended behaviors. First, we present TrackMeOrNot, a client-side tracking control mechanism that allows end users to selectively opt out of third-party web tracking based on their demand. Second, we propose a fine- grained permission mechanism for web applications to restrict the privilege of third-party JavaScript code.
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/1853/58766
    Collections
    • College of Computing Theses and Dissertations [1191]
    • Georgia Tech Theses and Dissertations [23877]

    Browse

    All of SMARTechCommunities & CollectionsDatesAuthorsTitlesSubjectsTypesThis CollectionDatesAuthorsTitlesSubjectsTypes

    My SMARTech

    Login

    Statistics

    View Usage StatisticsView Google Analytics Statistics
    facebook instagram twitter youtube
    • My Account
    • Contact us
    • Directory
    • Campus Map
    • Support/Give
    • Library Accessibility
      • About SMARTech
      • SMARTech Terms of Use
    Georgia Tech Library266 4th Street NW, Atlanta, GA 30332
    404.894.4500
    • Emergency Information
    • Legal and Privacy Information
    • Human Trafficking Notice
    • Accessibility
    • Accountability
    • Accreditation
    • Employment
    © 2020 Georgia Institute of Technology