Panagiotis Papadopoulos (FORTH-ICS, Greece), Panagiotis Ilia (FORTH-ICS), Michalis Polychronakis (Stony Brook University, USA), Evangelos P. Markatos (FORTH-ICS, Greece), Sotiris Ioannidis (FORTH-ICS, Greece), Giorgos Vasiliadis (FORTH-ICS, Greece)

The proliferation of web applications has essentially transformed modern browsers into small but powerful operating systems. Upon visiting a website, user devices run implicitly trusted script code, the execution of which is confined within the browser to prevent any interference with the user’s system. Recent JavaScript APIs, however, provide advanced capabilities that not only enable feature-rich web applications, but also allow attackers to perform malicious operations despite the confined nature of JavaScript code execution.
In this paper, we demonstrate the powerful capabilities that modern browser APIs provide to attackers by presenting MarioNet: a framework that allows a remote malicious entity to control a visitor’s browser and abuse its resources for unwanted computation or harmful operations, such as cryptocurrency mining, password-cracking, and DDoS. MarioNet relies solely on already available HTML5 APIs, without requiring the installation of any additional software. In contrast to previous browser- based botnets, the persistence and stealthiness characteristics of MarioNet allow the malicious computations to continue in the background of the browser even after the user closes the window or tab of the initially visited malicious website. We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of our prototype system, which is compatible with all major browsers, and discuss potential defense strategies to counter the threat of such persistent in- browser attacks. Our main goal is to raise awareness about this new class of attacks, and inform the design of future browser APIs so that they provide a more secure client-side environment for web applications.

View More Papers

Stealthy Adversarial Perturbations Against Real-Time Video Classification Systems

Shasha Li (University of California Riverside), Ajaya Neupane (University of California Riverside), Sujoy Paul (University of California Riverside), Chengyu Song (University of California Riverside), Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy (University of California Riverside), Amit K. Roy Chowdhury (University of California Riverside), Ananthram Swami (United States Army Research Laboratory)

Read More

Anonymous Multi-Hop Locks for Blockchain Scalability and Interoperability

Giulio Malavolta (Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg), Pedro Moreno Sanchez (TU Wien), Clara Schneidewind (TU Wien), Aniket Kate (Purdue University), Matteo Maffei (TU Wien)

Read More

Component-Based Formal Analysis of 5G-AKA: Channel Assumptions and Session...

Cas Cremers (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Martin Dehnel-Wild (University of Oxford)

Read More

How Bad Can It Git? Characterizing Secret Leakage in...

Michael Meli (North Carolina State University), Matthew R. McNiece (Cisco Systems and North Carolina State University), Bradley Reaves (North Carolina State University)

Read More