Biblio
Most Web sites rely on resources hosted by third parties such as CDNs. Third parties may be compromised or coerced into misbehaving, e.g. delivering a malicious script or stylesheet. Unexpected changes to resources hosted by third parties can be detected with the Subresource Integrity (SRI) mechanism. The focus of SRI is on scripts and stylesheets. Web fonts cannot be secured with that mechanism under all circumstances. The first contribution of this paper is to evaluates the potential for attacks using malicious fonts. With an instrumented browser we find that (1) more than 95% of the top 50,000 Web sites of the Tranco top list rely on resources hosted by third parties and that (2) only a small fraction employs SRI. Moreover, we find that more than 60% of the sites in our sample use fonts hosted by third parties, most of which are being served by Google. The second contribution of the paper is a proof of concept of a malicious font as well as a tool for automatically generating such a font, which targets security-conscious users who are used to verifying cryptographic fingerprints. Software vendors publish such fingerprints along with their software packages to allow users to verify their integrity. Due to incomplete SRI support for Web fonts, a third party could force a browser to load our malicious font. The font targets a particular cryptographic fingerprint and renders it as a desired different fingerprint. This allows attackers to fool users into believing that they download a genuine software package although they are actually downloading a maliciously modified version. Finally, we propose countermeasures that could be deployed to protect the integrity of Web fonts.
With the pretty prompt growth in Internet content, the main usage pattern of internet is shifting from traditional host-to-host model to content dissemination model. To support content distribution, content delivery networks (CDNs) gives an ad-hoc solution and some of future internet projects suggest a clean-slate design. Web applications have become one of the fundamental internet services. How to effectively support the popular browser-based web application is one of keys to success for future internet projects. This paper proposes the IDNet-based web applications. IDNet consists of id/locator separation scheme and domain-insulated autonomous network architecture (DIANA) which redesign the future internet in the clean slate basis. We design and develop an IDNet Browser based on the open source Qt. IDNet browser enables ID fetching and rendering by both `idp:/' schemes URID (Universal Resource Identifier) and `http:/' schemes URI in HTML The experiment shows that it can well be applicable to the IDNet test topology.