History Sniffing in Perspective
The computer scientists say that history sniffing does not pose as great a risk to your privacy or identity as malicious software programs (malware) that can steal your banking information or your entire Facebook profile. But, according to Shacham, "history sniffing is unusual in effectively allowing any site you visit to learn about your browsing habits on any other site, regardless if the two sites have any business relationship."
"I think people who have updated or switched browsers should now worry about things other than history sniffing, like keeping their Flash plug-in up to date so they don't get exploited. But that doesn't mean that the companies that have engaged in history sniffing for the currently 60 percent of the user population that is vulnerable to it should get a free pass," said Shacham.
Tracking History Sniffing
The UC San Diego history-sniffing detection tool analyzes the JavaScript running on the page to identify and tag all instances where the browser history is being checked. The way the system tags each of these potential history tracking events can be compared to the ink or paint packets that banks add to bags of money being stolen.
"As soon as a JavaScript tries to look at the color of a link, we immediately put 'paint' on that. Some sites collected that information but never sent it over the network, so there was all this 'paint' inside the browser. But in other cases, we observed 'paint' being sent over the network, indicating that history sniffing is going on," explained Lerner. The computer scientists only considered it history sniffing when the browser history information was sent over the network to a server.
"We detected when browser history is looked at, collected on the browser and sent on the network from the browser to their servers. What servers then do with that information is speculation," said Lerner.
The "paint" tracking approach to monitoring JavaScript could be useful for more than just history sniffing, Lerner explained. "It could be useful for understanding what information is being leaked by applications on Web 2.0 sites. Many of these apps use a lot of JavaScript."
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