The Chain of Implicit Trust: An Analysis of the Web Third-party Resources Loading
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The Web is a tangled mass of interconnected services, where websites import a range of external resources from various third-party domains. However, the latter can further load resources hosted on other domains. For each website, this creates a dependency chain underpinned by a form of implicit trust between the first-party and transitively connected third-parties. The chain can only be loosely controlled as first-party websites often have little, if any, visibility of where these resources are loaded from. This paper performs a large-scale study of dependency chains in the Web, to find that around 50 first-party websites render content that they did not directly load. Although the majority (84.91 levels), we find websites with dependency chains exceeding 30. Using VirusTotal, we show that 1.2 suspicious --- although seemingly small, this limited set of suspicious third-parties have remarkable reach into the wider ecosystem. By running sandboxed experiments, we observe a range of activities with the majority of suspicious JavaScript downloading malware; worryingly, we find this propensity is greater among implicitly trusted JavaScripts.
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