Efficient Auditing of Event-driven Web Applications

Abstract

When a deployer of a web application puts that application on a server (on-prem or cloud), how can they be sure that the application is executing as intended? This paper studies how the deployer can efficiently check that the execution is faithful. We seek mechanisms that: (i) work with web applications that are built with modern event-driven web frameworks, (ii) impose tolerable computation and communication overheads on the web server, and (iii) are complete and sound. We exhibit such a mechanism, based on a new record-replay algorithm. We have implemented our algorithm in Karousos, a system that audits Node.js web applications.