Detecting and understanding JavaScript global identifier conflicts on the web

JavaScript is widely used for implementing client-side web applications, and it is common to include JavaScript code from many different hosts. However, in a web browser, all the scripts loaded in the same frame share a single global namespace. As a result, a script may read or even overwrite the global objects or functions in other scripts, causing unexpected behaviors. For example, a script can redefine a function in a different script as an object, so that any call of that function would cause an exception at run time.

We systematically investigate the client-side JavaScript code integrity problem caused by JavaScript global identifier conflicts in this paper. We developed a browser-based analysis framework, JSObserver, to collect and analyze the write operations to global memory locations by JavaScript code. We identified three categories of conflicts using JSObserver on the Alexa top 100K websites, and detected 145,918 conflicts on 31,615 websites.

We reveal that JavaScript global identifier conflicts are prevalent and could cause behavior deviation at run time. In particular, we discovered that 1,611 redefined functions were called after being overwritten, and many scripts modified the value of cookies or redefined cookie-related functions. Our research demonstrated that JavaScript global identifier conflict is an emerging threat to both the web users and the integrity of web applications.