Section: Research Program

Provably secure web applications

Web applications are fast becoming the dominant programming platform for new software, probably because they offer a quick and easy way for developers to deploy and sell their apps to a large number of customers. Third-party web-based apps for Facebook, Apple, and Google, already number in the hundreds of thousands and are likely to grow in number. Many of these applications store and manage private user data, such as health information, credit card data, and GPS locations. To protect this data, applications tend to use an ad hoc combination of cryptographic primitives and protocols. Since designing cryptographic applications is easy to get wrong even for experts, we believe this is an opportune moment to develop security libraries and verification techniques to help web application programmers.

As a typical example, consider commercial password managers, such as LastPass, RoboForm, and 1Password. They are implemented as browser-based web applications that, for a monthly fee, offer to store a user's passwords securely on the web and synchronize them across all of the user's computers and smartphones. The passwords are encrypted using a master password (known only to the user) and stored in the cloud. Hence, no-one except the user should ever be able to read her passwords. When the user visits a web page that has a login form, the password manager asks the user to decrypt her password for this website and automatically fills in the login form. Hence, the user no longer has to remember passwords (except her master password) and all her passwords are available on every computer she uses.

Password managers are available as browser extensions for mainstream browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer, and as downloadable apps for Android and Apple phones. So, seen as a distributed application, each password manager application consists of a web service (written in PHP or Java), some number of browser extensions (written in JavaScript), and some smartphone apps (written in Java or Objective C). Each of these components uses a different cryptographic library to encrypt and decrypt password data. How do we verify the correctness of all these components?

We propose three approaches. For client-side web applications and browser extensions written in JavaScript, we propose to build a static and dynamic program analysis framework to verify security invariants. For Android smartphone apps and web services written in Java, we propose to develop annotated JML cryptography libraries that can be used with static analysis tools like ESC/Java to verify the security of application code. For clients and web services written in F# for the .NET platform, we propose to use F7 to verify their correctness.