Microsoft Research Releases New Paper…Schools Us In Browser Security

By Marc Handelman on February 23rd, 2009

ms internet explorer recycled

As Internet Explorer’s market share drops like a middle aged gents’ allopecia-ridden follicular environment…Microsoft Corporation’s (NasdaqGS: MSFT) Research Center [in this case a team comprised of of Alexander Moshchuk, Herman Venter , Chris Grier, Samuel T. King, Piali Choudhury and Helen Wang], has released a paper detailing their concerted take on what Browser Security is all about…The released document can be downloaded directly from Microsoft Research. More information appears after the jump.

From Microsoft Research: “The Multi-Principal OS Construction of the Gazelle Web Browser” by Helen J. Wang, Chris Grier, Alexander Moshchuk, Samuel T. King, Piali Choudhury, Herman Venter, 19 Feb. 2009 “Web browsers originated as applications that people used to view static web sites sequentially. As web sites evolved into dynamic web applications composing content from various web sites, browsers have become multi-principal operating environments with resources shared among mutually distrusting web site {it principals}. Nevertheless, no existing browsers, including new architectures like IE 8, Google Chrome, and OP, have a multi-principal operating system construction that gives a browser-based OS the exclusive control to manage the protection of all system resourcesamong web site principals. In this paper, we introduce Gazelle, a secure web browser constructed as a multi-principal OS. Gazelle’s Browser Kernel is an operating system that exclusively manages resource protection and sharing across web site principals. This construction exposes intricate design issues that no previous work has identified, such as legacy protection of cross-origin script source, and cross-principal, cross-process display and events protection. We elaborate on these issues and provide comprehensive solutions…”