Web Content Signing with Service Workers

Abstract

Securing the communication between a web server and a browser is a fundamental task of securing the World Wide Web. Websites today rely heavily on HTTPS to set up secure connections. In recent years, several incidents undermined this trust and therefore the security of the HTTPS system. In this paper we introduce an approach allowing to secure JavaScript files in case a HTTPS connection between web server and browser is compromised. Our paper presents a solution to safeguard the user's browser so that it only processes content (e.g., JavaScript or HTML) that was genuinely provided by the web application service providers themselves. Our solution makes use of service workers, a recently proposed W3C Candidate Recommendation enabling applications to take advantage of persistent background processing, including hooks to enable bootstrapping of web applications while offline. It demonstrates how service workers are able to validate the integrity of JavaScript files within the client's browser and how service workers are used to detect and mitigate malicious JavaScript files.