Blockaid: Data Access Policy Enforcement for Web Applications

Wen Zhang, Eric Sheng, Michael Chang, Aurojit Panda, Mooly Sagiv, Scott Shenker

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Modern web applications serve large amounts of sensitive user data, access to which is typically governed by data-access policies. Enforcing such policies is crucial to preventing improper data access, and prior work has proposed many enforcement mechanisms. However, these prior methods either alter application semantics or require adopting a new programming model; the former can result in unexpected application behavior, while the latter cannot be used with existing web frameworks. Blockaid is an access-policy enforcement system that preserves application semantics and is compatible with existing web frameworks. It intercepts database queries from the application, attempts to verify that each query is policy-compliant, and blocks queries that are not. It verifies policy compliance using SMT solvers and generalizes and caches previous compliance decisions for better performance. We show that Blockaid supports existing web applications while requiring minimal code changes and adding only modest overheads.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 16th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, OSDI 2022
PublisherUSENIX Association
Pages701-718
Number of pages18
ISBN (Electronic)9781939133281
StatePublished - 2022
Event16th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, OSDI 2022 - Carlsbad, United States
Duration: Jul 11 2022Jul 13 2022

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 16th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, OSDI 2022

Conference

Conference16th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, OSDI 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityCarlsbad
Period7/11/227/13/22

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Information Systems

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