Firefox would also be susceptible to the technique, but a bug prevents the attack from working at the moment. The attack works against Chrome, Safari, Edge, and until recently Brave, which developed an effective countermeasure after receiving a private report from the researchers. To make matters worse, the idiosyncratic caching behavior of modern browsers, lends a particularly egregious property to our attack as resources in the favicon cache are used even when browsing in incognito mode due to improper isolation practices in all major browsers. The attack workflow can be easily implemented by any website, without the need for user interaction or consent, and works even when popular anti-tracking extensions are deployed. “Overall, while favicons have long been considered a simple decorative resource supported by browsers to facilitate websites’ branding, our research demonstrates that they introduce a powerful tracking vector that poses a significant privacy threat to users,” the researchers wrote. Websites can abuse this arrangement by loading a series of favicons on visitors’ browsers that uniquely identify them over an extended period of time. Researchers from the University of Illinois, Chicago said in a new paper that most browsers cache the images in a location that’s separate from the ones used to store site data, browsing history, and cookies. The technique leverages the use of favicons, the tiny icons that websites display in users’ browser tabs and bookmark lists. Now, websites have a new way to defeat all three. The prospect of Web users being tracked by the sites they visit has prompted several countermeasures over the years, including using Privacy Badger or an alternate anti-tracking extension, enabling private or incognito browsing sessions, or clearing cookies.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |