Web Browsers and Security

Today the World Wide Web is considered to be a platform for building distributed applications. This evolution is made possible by browsers with processing capabilities and by programming languages that allow web designers to embed real programs into HTML documents. Downloading and executing code from anywhere on the Internet brings security problems along with it. A systematic and thorough analysis of security flaws in the browsers and related technology is necessary to reach a sufficient level of confidence. This paper presents some preliminary results of ongoing research that has the final goal of developing properties for secure browsers and procedures for secure browsing. The research started by investigating features provided by the standard environment. The paper describes some experimental attacks that have been carried out by exploiting features of Java and JavaScript executed by Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Explorer browsers.