ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION TECHNIQUES AND TOOLS FOR SECURE WEB BROWSER EXTENSION DEVELOPMENT

Many modern application platforms support an extensible architecture that allows the appli-cation core to be extended with functionality developed by third-parties. This bootstraps a developer community that works together to enhance and customize the basic functionality of those platforms. To ease development of such extensions, these platforms expose an API that third-parties can use to implement their functionality. For instance, Web applications make use of the browser’s Document Object Model (DOM) API, smart phone applications use the mobile platform’s SDK and browser extensions use the extension API. These APIs usually endow extension developers with privileges to access various system resources. However, to isolate the platform from any new security threats caused by these untrusted extensions, the API must ideally restrict extensions ’ authority. Thus, an important challenge is to simplify ex-tension programming for the third-party developers while ensuring that these extensions do not compromise the security of the application core. This dissertation seeks to address the above issues in the context of Web browser extensions. It presents algorithms and tools to facilitate secure Web browser extension development. In particular, it makes the following two contributions