A Systematic Review of Security Measures for Web Browser Extension Vulnerabilities

Web browser is a software application using which we can perform most of the internet-based activities. The commonly used browsers are Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera Mini, and Internet Explorer. Many web applications provide extensions to these browsers to enhance their functionality, while some of the extensions perform malicious activities to get access to the sensitive data without the user’s knowledge. This paper presents a review of the research done on the browser extension vulnerabilities. We found that the most of the researches were done for Firefox and Chrome extensions. Static analysis technique was used in most of the solutions proposed by various researchers. There is no ready to use tool for evaluating the vulnerable behavior of an extension. Hence there is need for more research to evaluate and eliminate the vulnerabilities in web browser extensions.