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Websites have a new way to spy on visitors: analyzing their SSD activity

arstechnica.com

31–40 of 97 posts

Re: Websites have a new way to spy on visitors: analyzing their SSD activity

#31
post #15

I’m skeptical of these side channel attacks that rely on training a neural network on specific controlled scenarios on controlled hardware. I believe that with enough time and effort and the perfect circumstances where the user is only visiting their website and doing one other thing that the network was trained on it can match. It does not seem useful as a general purpose side channel vector.

It depends what you mean by "general purpose." First, these things generalize more often than you'd expect. Second, even in the absence of generalization they're still useful for, e.g., fingerprinting activities to manufacture a unique ID where non previously existed.

The paper isn’t describing a unique ID fingerprint. It’s looking for specific activity patterns to match against training data of running specific commands on specific hardware.

Re: Websites have a new way to spy on visitors: analyzing their SSD activity

#34
post #23
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this surprising? Websites have long been silently writing to disk, for cache, cookies, and blobs. OPFS just provides a file-system-like API for ultimately the same functionality

Yes? From the paper: "On Chrome and Safari, OPFS supports very large files, up to 60 % of disk space, which is more than sufficient to avoid the page cache on most typical systems, as even a small disk size of 64 GB would allow us to create a 38.4 GB OPFS file." I am indeed surprised to learn that a random website can write a file that takes up 60% of my disk. Is this obviously a capability of Web browsers?

> Is this obviously a capability of Web browsers?

The main capability is RCE, but it seems that they need a way to store the payload.

Re: Websites have a new way to spy on visitors: analyzing their SSD activity

#35
post #23
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this surprising? Websites have long been silently writing to disk, for cache, cookies, and blobs. OPFS just provides a file-system-like API for ultimately the same functionality

Yes? From the paper: "On Chrome and Safari, OPFS supports very large files, up to 60 % of disk space, which is more than sufficient to avoid the page cache on most typical systems, as even a small disk size of 64 GB would allow us to create a 38.4 GB OPFS file." I am indeed surprised to learn that a random website can write a file that takes up 60% of my disk. Is this obviously a capability of Web browsers?

Not only that, but they don't even provide any visibility into what's being stored. Firefox developer tools doesn't even have OPFS browser functionality. IIRC I even saw some stuff about going out of the way to make it inaccessible by the user.

Re: Websites have a new way to spy on visitors: analyzing their SSD activity

#36
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Without even asking whether the site can use local storage? Where did you see this in the article? I had some recollection that Firefox at least did require asking the user.

Firefox doesn't ask permission just to use localstorage, no modern browser does this. The closest thing you get is when a site wants to persist storage with "navigator.storage.persist()", which should prompt you for permission. But localstorage data usually persists anyway, and only gets deleted if the browser's storage is "under pressure", so I've never personally worked on a site or web app that had to use that API…

Btw. as per EU law (GDPR) website owners are required to aquire informed consent for any kind of client side storage if it contains information that is personal. And it has been ruled that any information that can be used to identify returning users is such.

People think the GDPR is just about cookies, but it is agnostic of the technology used.

Maximum fines: €20 million, or 4% of the company's total worldwide annual turnover of the preceding financial year — whichever is higher.

And informed consent means they need to know what data you collect/store for which purposes and there needs to be an equally easy to select No-Option.

Re: Websites have a new way to spy on visitors: analyzing their SSD activity

#38

It should be fairly easy to mitigate no? Simply add random access times. Localstorage doesn't need to be that fast. More generally I find it very annoying how much browsers allow by default (javascript, localstorage, gpu access etc.) - there's only a very limited amount of websites I want to be able to run gpu accelerated shaders.

> Simply add random access times.

That doesn't work. Because the random times are uniformly distributed it's possible to remove it from the data by additional sampling. You do make it harder because you need a lot more data, but it's still possible to extract the signal, because the noise is uniform.

Re: Websites have a new way to spy on visitors: analyzing their SSD activity

#39
post #38

It should be fairly easy to mitigate no? Simply add random access times. Localstorage doesn't need to be that fast. More generally I find it very annoying how much browsers allow by default (javascript, localstorage, gpu access etc.) - there's only a very limited amount of websites I want to be able to run gpu accelerated shaders.

> Simply add random access times. That doesn't work. Because the random times are uniformly distributed it's possible to remove it from the data by additional sampling. You do make it harder because you need a lot more data, but it's still possible to extract the signal, because the noise is uniform.

The random times don't have to be uniformly distributed. Though it's enough for attackers to know the distribution to de-noisify it.
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