Section: Application Domains

Web application security

Web applications use a variety of cryptographic techniques to securely store and exchange sensitive data for their users. For example, a website may serve pages over HTTPS, authenticate users with a single sign-on protocol such as OAuth, encrypt user files on the server-side using XML encryption, and deploy client-side cryptographic mechanisms using a JavaScript cryptographic library. The security of these applications depends on the public key infrastructure (X.509 certificates), web browsers' implementation of HTTPS and the same origin policy (SOP), the semantics of JavaScript, HTML5, and their various associated security standards, as well as the correctness of the specific web application code of interest. We build analysis tools to find bugs in all these artifacts and verification tools that can analyze commercial web applications and evaluate their security against sophisticated web-based attacks.