Grant: Strategic Projects Supplemental Competition

The advent of the social networking web application Facebook witnesses the arrival of a new softwarearchitecture for web applications. What distinguishes this new generation of web applications is extensibility.Specifically, the user may allow third-party software components that enrich user experience to interact withFacebook in order to gain access to the contents owned by the user. Unfortunately, because these softwarecomponents are hosted on remote sites over which neither Facebook nor the user has control, there is noguarantee that the components will behave in a benign manner. The extensible architecture also makes itdifficult for the user to understand the privacy impact of his or her actions. Nonetheless, this type of extensiblearchitecture is an appealing one for a wide variety of Web 2.0 applications, so that it is crucial that protectivetechniques be developed as quickly as possible.In this research, we will explore, assess, and confront the security challenges presented by the interplaybetween user-owned contents and third-party software components. We will invent and study technologies thatwill assist users in evaluating and visualizing the privacy impacts of their actions, as will as methods for a webapplication to monitor the integrity of a third-party software component that is hosted on an untrusted site butyet possesses remote access to the resources residing in the web application.