Securing Graphical User Interfaces

Malware such as Trojan Horses and spyware remain to be persistent security threats that exploit the overly complex graphical user interfaces of today's commodity operating systems. Current GUI architectures have to find a balance between the four conflicting goals of maintaining compatibility to existing applications, providing quality of service, operating at high performance, and of being secure, whereby the latter goal still remains widely disregarded by mainstream GUI architectures. The challenge of Norman Feske's work was to resolve the conflict. He developed key techniques and substantiated the concepts by a number of exhaustive experiments. The resulting architecture consolidates the advantages of extremely low source-code complexity, full client isolation, protection against spyware and Trojan Horses, bounded output latency, and compatibility to existing applications into one GUI-server design.

secure-gui-2009.pdf — PDF document, 2781Kb