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Web Architecture and Web Browsers

Web content is migrating away from simple hyperlinked documents towards a diverse set of programs that execute within the web browser. Desktop applications are quickly being replaced by their Web counterparts, and users are increasingly relying on the Web and their browsers as their primary computing platform. Unfortunately, modern browsers simply do not provide a safe environment for running Web programs.

As a consequence, we have been investigating new browser architectures, Web mechanisms, and new Web architectures. Here are some of our results:

Detecting In-Flight Page Changes with Web Tripwires.
Charles Reis, Steven D. Gribble, and Tadayoshi Kohno (University of Washington). Nicholas C. Weaver (International Computer Science Institute).
To appear in the Proceedings of the 5th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, San Francisco, CA, April 2008.

You can try out and download our tripwire prototype here.
Architectural Principles for Safe Web Programs.
Charles Reis, Steven D. Gribble, and Henry M. Levy.
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets 2007), Atlanta, Georgia, November 2007.
Using Processes to Improve the Reliability of Browser-based Applications.
Charles Reis, Brian Bershad, Steven D. Gribble, Henry M. Levy.
Technical Report UW-CSE-2007-12-01, University of Washington, December 2007.
SpyProxy: Execution-based Detection of Malicious Web Content.
Alexander Moshchuk, Tanya Bragin, Damien Deville, Steven D. Gribble, and Henry M. Levy.
Proceedings of the 16th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 2007), Boston, MA, August 2007.
A Safety-Oriented Platform for Web Applications.
Richard S. Cox, Jacob Gorm Hansen, Steven D. Gribble, and Henry M. Levy.
Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Oakland, CA, May 2006.

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[comments to gribble]