Maverick: Providing Web Applications with Safe and Flexible Access to Local Devices

Web browsers do not yet provide Web programs with the same safe, convenient access to local devices that operating systems provide to native programs. As a result, Web programmers must either wait for the slowly evolving HTML standard to add support for the device classes they want to use, or they must use difficult to deploy browser plug-ins to add the access they need. This paper describes Maverick, a browser that provides Web applications with safe and flexible access to local devices. Maverick lets Web programmers implement USB device drivers and frameworks, like file systems or streaming video layers, using standard Web programming technologies such as HTML, JavaScript, or even code executed in a native client sandbox. These Web drivers and Web frameworks are downloaded dynamically from Web servers and executed by browsers alongside Web applications. Maverick provides Web drivers with protected access to the USB bus, and it provides Web drivers and frameworks with event-driven IPC channels to communicate with each other and with Web applications. We prototyped Maverick by modifying the Chrome Web browser and the Linux kernel. Using Maverick, we have implemented: several Web drivers, including a USB mass storage driver and a Webcam driver; several Web frameworks, including a FAT16 filesystem and a streaming video framework; and, several Web applications that exercise them. Our experiments show that Web drivers, frameworks, and applications are practical, easy to author, and have sufficient performance, even when implemented in JavaScript.