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CodeX: Contextual Flow Tracking for Browser Extensions
Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden.
Kth Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.
Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden.
Mälardalen University. Kth Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.
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2025 (English)Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

Browser extensions put millions of users at risk when misusing their elevated privileges. Despite the current practices of semi-automated code vetting, privacy-violating extensions still thrive in the official stores. We propose an approach for tracking contextual flows from browser-specific sensitive sources like cookies, browsing history, bookmarks, and search terms to suspicious network sinks through network requests. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach by a prototype called CodeX that leverages the power of CodeQL while breaking away from the conservativeness of bug-finding flavors of the traditional CodeQL taint analysis. Applying CodeX to the extensions published on the Chrome Web Store between March 2021 and March 2024 identified 1,588 extensions with risky flows. Manual verification of 339 of those extensions resulted in flagging 212 as privacy-violating, impacting up to 3.6M users.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) , 2025.
National Category
Computer Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:mdh:diva-72930DOI: 10.1145/3714393.3726495ISI: 001527521500003Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105011342229ISBN: 979-8-4007-1476-4 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:mdh-72930DiVA, id: diva2:1986195
Conference
15th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy, CODASPY 2025, Pittsburgh
Available from: 2025-07-30 Created: 2025-07-30 Last updated: 2026-03-27Bibliographically approved

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fulltext(1176 kB)6 downloads
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File name FULLTEXT01.pdfFile size 1176 kBChecksum SHA-512
cbdff2e61ad7610c6451412a4d1cbe1d904736dcfd9ed33dc94779ea5c9374f27fecaea3fb6bb925a9a94b28be8d1e77e8ae5cef9d38bfb766535a0796e5d48f
Type fulltextMimetype application/pdf

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CiteExportLink to record
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  • apa
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  • de-DE
  • en-GB
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  • nn-NO
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Output format
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