The Gazelle Web Browser

Chris Grier
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Web browsers began as applications used to view static HTML content. As web sites evolved into dynamic applications composing content from various web sites, browsers have become multi-principal operating environments responsible for securely managing resources shared between mutually distrusting web sites.

In this talk, I will discuss the design of the Gazelle web browser. Gazelle is a new web browser designed and constructed as a multi-principal operating system. Constructing a browser as an OS exposes intricate security and design issues that other browsers have yet to address and I'll talk about the security issues we uncovered and how Gazelle handles them. The Gazelle tech report was recently Slashdotted and is available from the MSR web site.

Slides:

There is no downloadable version of the slides for this talk available at this time.

About the speaker:

Chris Grier is an about-to-graduate student at the University of Illinois in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. He has developed two browsers, OP and Gazelle, as part of his research in web and browser security. Gazelle was developed while at Microsoft Research.

Contact information:

Chris Grier
grier@illinois.edu