Communications of the ACM
New Web Privacy System Could Revolutionize the Safety of Surfing
Researchers at University College London (UCL), Google, Stanford University, Chalmers, and Mozilla Research say they have developed an open source system that protects Internet users' privacy while increasing the flexibility for Web developers to create applications that combine data from different websites, thereby improving the safety of surfing the Web. The system, called Confinement with Origin Web Labels (COWL), works with Mozilla's Firefox and the open source version of Google's Chrome Web browsers and prevents malicious code in a website from leaking sensitive information to unauthorized parties.
"COWL achieves both privacy for the user and flexibility for the Web application developer," says UCL professor Brad Karp. "Achieving both these aims, which are often in opposition in many system designs, is one of the central challenges in computer systems security research."
COWL helps block the development of Web applications that synthesize content from multiple websites, a technique that previously involved having the Same Origin Policy force Web developers to make design choices that put users privacy at risk. "What we've achieved in COWL is a system that lets Web developers build feature-rich applications that combine data from different websites without requiring that users share their login details directly with third-party Web applications," says Stanford Ph.D. student Deian Stefan.
From University College London
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