[Colloquium] Reminder: Khan/MS Presentation/Jun 20, 2019

[Margaret Jaffey]

This is a reminder about Minhaj Us Salam Khan's MS Presentation
tomorrow.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date:  Thursday, June 20, 2019

Time:  12:30 PM

Place:  John Crerar Library 390

M.S. Candidate:  Minhaj Us Salam Khan

M.S. Paper Title: WEB TRANSPARENCY: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF THE
SIMILARITY OF CLIENT SIDE JAVASCRIPT

Abstract:
As web applications are increasingly used for security and
privacy-sensitive activities, there is growing concern that the
providers of those products could act maliciously due to compromise or
coercion. Most webpages are actually JavaScript programs. Currently,
when a user visits a website, the JavaScript served by that website is
inherently trusted by all of the commodity web browsers. This creates
a problem where a compromised server can serve malicious JavaScript
just to a small subset of clients without the possibility of
detection. In an ideal world, there would exist a system that counters
this by building a log that allows the clients to verify that the code
they are being served is the same as the code served to other clients.
In this paper we present the results of an empirical study of the
nature of JavaScript on the web with the objective of determining the
possibility of building the aforementioned log. To this end, we use an
instrumented version of Google's Chromium browser to fetch a large
corpus of JavaScript samples served by popular websites. We then test
various methods for classifying differences between variants of
JavaScript code. Each of these methods differ in the methods of
feature vector construction from JavaScript code and the choice of
clustering algorithms.

Minhaj Us Salam's advisor is Prof. Ariel Feldman

Login to the Computer Science Department website for details:
 https://newtraell.cs.uchicago.edu/phd/ms_announcements#minhajkhan

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Margaret P. Jaffey            margaret at cs.uchicago.edu
Department of Computer Science
Student Support Rep (Ry 156)               (773) 702-6011
The University of Chicago      http://www.cs.uchicago.edu
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=