Antria Vasileiou Undergraduate Dissertation 2017/18

A Framework for the Security Analysing of Browser Extensions

Supervised by A.Brucker

Abstract

Nowadays, browser extensions have become increasingly popular, resulting to more people trusting their functionality. The reality is, though, that as the number of extensions is increasing, their behavior grows to be harmful to the user. Following that, because extensions hold great power against the browser, malicious extensions can gain the majority of the information that the browser contains, including private information of the user.

This project aims to produce a detailed security analysis on Chrome extensions and to provide a program that can detect how many malicious extensions may be. This analysis will focus on the permissions and the hosts that each extension requires, in order to give answers to questions like how many permissions an extension asks, does it need those permissions? Finally, a user interface has been created to present a user defined extension, the permissions, the hosts and a percentage of how dangerous that extension is.