5 ms·
Let me give you an example. It will be contrived for simplicity but there are circumstances that will seem more real-worldish. Lets consider the following scena
by chias 7y ago
Let me give you an example. It will be contrived for simplicity but there are circumstances that will seem more real-worldish. Lets consider the following scenario:
- you visit a page at example.com that contains private data about you (e.g. bank account number, medical conditions, what have you)
- this page loads external resources only when they are scrolled into view
- it also hotlinks some image below the fold that a potentially bad actor can see requests to (maybe the image is on their webserver, maybe you're on a corp network and they can see dns resolutions, whatever)
So now I link you to:
https://example.com/privatepage#:~:text=Account%201 https://example.com/privatepage#:~:text=Account%201
Did the image get requested? If yes, I know your account number starts with 1; if not, I know it starts with something other than 1. Rinse and repeat.
- tpmx 7y ago> Rinse and repeat. How exactly would you as an attacker perform this rinse and repeat action?
- chadlavi 7y agoand why would a bank site hotlink to an asset owned by someone else? All the security concerns I've seen for this seem quite contrived to me. And I say that as someone who assiduously avoids google products* (*alas, except at work, because I can't really choose that)
- tpmx 7y agoI think this is the perfect storm. 1) Privacy-conscious browsers are trying to get exposure, so they are stretching an extremely narrow privacy risk into something extreme. 2) (I also believe) media companies are worried this will rob them of ad exposures, so they are incentivized to cover this as something scary. 3) The "bad guy" is Google. This means the amplitude of the story is immediately 10X larger.
- kllrnohj 7y agoHow are you determining whether or not the resource was requested? If you can hijack my network traffic you've already owned me pretty badly and don't need this silly game in the first place. If you haven't, this doesn't help you get that. Encrypted DNS is a thing, so snooping on those is non-trivial and not at all something you can be assumed to have access to.