Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2025

Screen Readers – Out of Sight, but in the TCB

Résumé

Modern operating systems (OSs) must balance strong security guarantees with accessibility obligations for blind users mandated by regulation and principles of equal treatment. Screen readers (SRs) translate user interfaces into braille or speech, but today’s SRs operate as large, monolithic processes with privileged access to input, output, and application state. This design places SRs in the trusted computing base (TCB) and exposes blind users to high risks: A compromised SR can inject input, capture sensitive output, or impersonate trusted system messages. We argue that SR functionality should be refactored into OS services with strict isolation and least privilege. Our proposed architecture decomposes input handling, output multiplexing, and braille-device access into components mediated by the window system and the kernel. This separation removes global event channels, reduces the TCB, and limits escalation paths. Our design aligns SR security with existing OS protection mechanisms, thereby shrinking the attack surface for a critical yet under-protected user group.

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Dates et versions

hal-05273382 , version 1 (22-09-2025)

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Sebastian Humenda, Samuel Thibault, Horst Schirmeier. Screen Readers – Out of Sight, but in the TCB. 2025 - Herbsttreffen der Fachgruppe Betriebssysteme, Sep 2025, Aachen, Germany. ⟨10.18420/fgbs2025h-03⟩. ⟨hal-05273382⟩
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