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HSTS Super Cookies

radicalresearch.co.uk

31–40 of 56 posts

Re: HSTS Super Cookies

#31
I'm actually pretty irritated that this researcher makes it out as an iOS thing only, it feels like he/she just didn't care to try on anything other than the device they had in front of them.

Chrome on Android behaves the same way the researcher described (fingerprinting works in Incognito tabs), but Chrome, Opera, Firefox, and IE on Windows all get different IDs.

Re: HSTS Super Cookies

#32
post #19

> The impact is that it's possible for a site to track you even if you choose to use "incognito" or "private" browsing features in an effort to avoid such tracking. I've always thought that (despite user hopes) the point of 'private' browsing was explicitly and only to avoid leaving traces on the user's computer anyway. (For example, I used it when shopping for Christmas presents.) The Firefox new private window has…

Google employees have explicitly agreed with this in the past, indicating that Incognito is explicitly not meant to anonymize the user: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=142214#c...

Re: HSTS Super Cookies

#35
>However, unlike cookies, existing HSTS flags are still shared with sites when using "incognito" or "private" windows.

fwiw, though Firefox is listed in there as "leaks across private mode", I get an entirely new ID when I open a private window. v34.0.5

Re: HSTS Super Cookies

#36

It sounds like HTTPS Everywhere is overlapping functionality with HSTS. Is there some way that HTTPS Everywhere could just inject HSTS rules rather than looking up every URL and rewriting it before sending a request?

HSTS can only change the protocol, while HTTPS everywhere can do more complex rewritings. So what you propose could only work in a very limited set of use cases among those handled by the plugin.

Re: HSTS Super Cookies

#38
There's a nice survey paper from 2012 that lists dozens of supercookie vectors, including HSTS.

https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/files/publication/files/tracki...

FTA: "A website can encode a globally unique pseudonymous device identifier into any stateful web technology so long as it persists at least log2 n bits, where n is the number of Internet-connected devices (presently roughly 5 billion, requiring 33 bits)."

Re: HSTS Super Cookies

#39
post #25
post #19

> The impact is that it's possible for a site to track you even if you choose to use "incognito" or "private" browsing features in an effort to avoid such tracking. I've always thought that (despite user hopes) the point of 'private' browsing was explicitly and only to avoid leaving traces on the user's computer anyway. (For example, I used it when shopping for Christmas presents.) The Firefox new private window has…

Many people use it to spawn what is effectively a "guest session" in which they can log into some site with account B when they're already normally logged in with account A, without having to log out of account A. Or, similarly, to temporarily deactivate such things as Google's per-user search results personalization. Sites that leak credentials into such "guest sessions" break their usage for such purposes. (In fact…

I don't think HSTS completely moots user profiles. Most "good" sites are not going to be storing session data encoded as HSTS timestamps.

Re: HSTS Super Cookies

#40
post #35

>However, unlike cookies, existing HSTS flags are still shared with sites when using "incognito" or "private" windows. fwiw, though Firefox is listed in there as "leaks across private mode", I get an entirely new ID when I open a private window. v34.0.5

again FWIW, Chrome v39.0.2171.95 on OSX leaks
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