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I did some digging. To me it was rather unclear about the impact of this. Furthermore, it definitely just feels like a recategorization/relabelling on Brave's p

I did some digging. To me it was rather unclear about the impact of this. Furthermore, it definitely just feels like a recategorization/relabelling on Brave's part to get some brownie points. Not that it's not interesting, but I feel it's just a new name but old concept. This [0] is a 1 year old referenced wiki page in the article, which itself is a reference to a 3 year old Chromium bug [1]. The issue is, as some commenters mentioned, one process in another tab hogging all the sockets can make determine the timing on a new socket that is requested. If the socket's timing is data dependent, then you can infer what the data is. That's basically XS-search attacks [2]. [1] uses the example of 'https://mail.yahoo.com/d/search/keyword= https://mail.yahoo.com/d/search/keyword=', where the keyword "Amazon Purchase" consumes a socket and takes a longer amount of time due to our socket hogging vs. if we didn't hog it. This timing dependency lets us know across tabs that the victim buys stuff off Amazon. In some cases, you can deterministically force the victim to execute this search query, and thus, the side channel. [0]: https://xsleaks.dev/docs/attacks/timing-attacks/connection-pool/ https://xsleaks.dev/docs/attacks/timing-attacks/connection-p... [1]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=843157 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=843157 [2]: https://xsleaks.dev/ https://xsleaks.dev/

chalst 5y ago
> Furthermore, it definitely just feels like a recategorization/relabelling on Brave's part to get some brownie points. Not that it's not interesting, but I feel it's just a new name but old concept. More generously, I'd say they were giving the matter a more accessible name to raise consciousness about it and because they intend to do significant future work addressing it. There is a marketing angle to this: they might then claim to be the most private browser on this basis. However, given they are cooperating with other browser dev teams on this, if the danger of bypassing anti-fingerprinting measures is as serious as they say, this seems quite legitimate.

chalst 5y ago

> Furthermore, it definitely just feels like a recategorization/relabelling on Brave's part to get some brownie points. Not that it's not interesting, but I feel it's just a new name but old concept. More generously, I'd say they were giving the matter a more accessible name to raise consciousness about it and because they intend to do significant future work addressing it. There is a marketing angle to this: they might then claim to be the most private browser on this basis. However, given they are cooperating with other browser dev teams on this, if the danger of bypassing anti-fingerprinting measures is as serious as they say, this seems quite legitimate.