CSAIL Event Calendar

Improving the Performance and Robustness of Web Applications

Web applications are becoming more popular, and they are increasingly competitive with desktop applications in terms of functionality and visual sophistication. Unfortunately, web applications suffer from unique challenges that traditional desktop programs do not face. A single web application often contains code from multiple, mutually distrusting domains; however, web browsers expose a complex, ill-specified security model that makes it difficult to reason about safety. Furthermore, web browsers are buggy and only semi-compatible with each other and the ostensible “web standards.” These challenges make it difficult to write robust, portable web applications.

In this talk, I describe several projects that make web applications more secure and performant. The first project, called Jigsaw, is a new framework for isolating the mutually distrusting JavaScript code that runs inside a single web application. Jigsaw works with unmodified browsers and provides strong, iframe-like isolation; however, all code runs in the same frame, and using a novel mechanism called surrogates, Jigsaw supports efficient, pass-by-reference sharing. The second project, called Atlantis, introduces a new exokernel browser architecture. Using this extensible architecture, web pages can define their own HTML parser, rendering engine, and so on. This gives web pages unprecedented control over their execution environment, and makes it easier to write robust applications.

BIO:
James Mickens is a researcher in the Distributed Systems group at MSR. Mickens received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 2008. While a student there, Mickens was legendary for his transcendental skills on the foosball table. He was also notorious for scheduling his thesis defense in the early hours of the morning so that nobody would attend it. This technique, popularly called "The Mickens Gambit," is now banned in 36 states.

See other events happening in November 2012