Protecting browser state from web privacy attacks

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Protecting browser state from web privacy attacks

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International World Wide Web Conference archive
Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web table of contents

Edinburgh, Scotland

SESSION: Improved search ranking table of contents

Pages: 737 - 744

Year of Publication: 2006

ISBN:1-59593-323-9

Authors

Collin Jackson	Stanford University
Andrew Bortz	Stanford University
Dan Boneh	Stanford University
John C. Mitchell	Stanford University

Sponsors

SIGWEB: ACM Special Interest Group on Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Web
ACM: Association for Computing Machinery

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

Bibliometrics

Downloads (6 Weeks): 20, Downloads (12 Months): 186, Citation Count: 10

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ABSTRACT

Through a variety of means, including a range of browser cache methods and inspecting the color of a visited hyperlink, client-side browser state can be exploited to track users against their wishes. This tracking is possible because persistent, client-side browser state is not properly partitioned on per-site basis in current browsers. We address this problem by refining the general notion of a "same-origin" policy and implementing two browser extensions that enforce this policy on the browser cache and visited links.We also analyze various degrees of cooperation between sites to track users, and show that even if long-term browser state is properly partitioned, it is still possible for sites to use modern web features to bounce users between sites and invisibly engage in cross-domain tracking of their visitors. Cooperative privacy attacks are an unavoidable consequence of all persistent browser state that affects the behavior of the browser, and disabling or frequently expiring this state is the only way to achieve true privacy against colluding parties.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

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CITED BY 10

	Jon Howell , Collin Jackson , Helen J. Wang , Xiaofeng Fan, MashupOS: operating system abstractions for client mashups, Proceedings of the 11th USENIX workshop on Hot topics in operating systems, p.1-7, May 07-09, 2007, San Diego, CA
	Andrew Bortz , Dan Boneh, Exposing private information by timing web applications, Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web, May 08-12, 2007, Banff, Alberta, Canada
	Collin Jackson , Helen J. Wang, Subspace: secure cross-domain communication for web mashups, Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web, May 08-12, 2007, Banff, Alberta, Canada
	Trevor Jim , Nikhil Swamy , Michael Hicks, Defeating script injection attacks with browser-enforced embedded policies, Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web, May 08-12, 2007, Banff, Alberta, Canada
	Balachander Krishnamurthy , Delfina Malandrino , Craig E. Wills, Measuring privacy loss and the impact of privacy protection in web browsing, Proceedings of the 3rd symposium on Usable privacy and security, July 18-20, 2007, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
	Shuo Chen , David Ross , Yi-Min Wang, An analysis of browser domain-isolation bugs and a light-weight transparent defense mechanism, Proceedings of the 14th ACM conference on Computer and communications security, October 28-31, 2007, Alexandria, Virginia, USA
	Felipe Saint-Jean , Aaron Johnson , Dan Boneh , Joan Feigenbaum, Private web search, Proceedings of the 2007 ACM workshop on Privacy in electronic society, October 29-29, 2007, Alexandria, Virginia, USA
	Collin Jackson , Adam Barth , Andrew Bortz , Weidong Shao , Dan Boneh, Protecting browsers from dns rebinding attacks, Proceedings of the 14th ACM conference on Computer and communications security, October 28-31, 2007, Alexandria, Virginia, USA
	Markus Jakobsson , Steven Myers, Delayed password disclosure, ACM SIGACT News, v.38 n.3, September 2007
	V. T. Lam , S. Antonatos , P. Akritidis , K. G. Anagnostakis, Puppetnets: misusing web browsers as a distributed attack infrastructure, Proceedings of the 13th ACM conference on Computer and communications security, October 30-November 03, 2006, Alexandria, Virginia, USA