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Supercookie: Browser Fingerprinting via Favicon (2021)
- zzo38computer 11mo agoDoes it work if you disable favicons? (I disabled favicons when I set up the computer, but for a different reason; it is a feature that I don't use.)
- mmooss 11mo agoIf websites can detect that you've disabled favicons, then you are easy to track between all websites because you are very unusual.
- fsmv 11mo agoI don't think that's true. You'll just look like someone who already has it cached.
- mmooss 11mo agoIt depends on how the browser rejects favicons? If the browser reports the icon is already cached, I agree (assuming the reports are indistinguishable). But maybe it just never downloads the icon, for example.
- ghssds 11mo ago> If the browser reports the icon is already cached Browsers don't do that.
- breppp 11mo agoI was sure this has been a thing for a while, either that or safari has a UI bug since forever. I regularly get the wrong favicon in specific sites, for example ars technica favicon in reddit
- robotnikman 11mo agoI get the same bug in Firefox as well sometimes.
- goodells 11mo agoI thought I was the only one! Something in the UI cache is so horribly corrupted and it has been for years on my MacBook, I just gave up hope.
- croes 11mo agoI get the wrong for HN in mobile Chrome
- cubefox 11mo agoSo a similar favicon bug exists in Safari, Firefox, and Chrome. Impressive!
- snailmailman 11mo agoMy hacker news icon has been stuck as the icon for a weather site that I sometimes check. It’s been stuck that way for close to a year now, and has survived an iOS update too. It persists across profiles and into private browsing mode.
- gitmagic 11mo agoWhat is the live demo supposed to do? I just get stuck in an endless redirect loop with a counter going from 1 to 18 and then restarting. I’m using Safari on iOS.
- dizhn 11mo agoAndroid/Firefox it showed me my unique ID after the first 18. Then there was a button to try again ans that put me in the same loop you're having.
- int0x29 11mo agoFireFox for Android private browsing mode gets stuck in the loop 100% for me
- QuantumNomad_ 11mo agoSafari on iOS. It goes to 18/18 and then starts over from 1/18 again for me too. I had not pressed any retry button, this happened the first time I visited the page. And I wasn’t even in private browsing mode. Just navigated to it normally.
- waitwhatwhoa 11mo agoThis was fixed after we reported it a few years ago while working on the paper.
- hekkle 11mo agoLook at the Github repo: - The last update was 2 years ago. - It says that MS Edge 87 is affected. The current Version of Edge is 142. This is no longer an issue, but it is interesting thinking about how long the NSA knew about this before the general population did.
- soulofmischief 11mo agoI got different IDs in regular browsing vs incognito mode in Firefox.
- vanschelven 11mo agoIt's a shame that the actual attack mechanism doesn't seem to be detailed on the github repo, and the link to the article is dead.
- waitwhatwhoa 11mo agoPaper author here, here’s a valid link: https://www.cs.uic.edu/~polakis/papers/favicon.pdf https://www.cs.uic.edu/~polakis/papers/favicon.pdf
- majkinetor 11mo agohttps://supercookie.me/workwise https://supercookie.me/workwise
- sjdonado 11mo agoThe demo didn't work for me. Safari latest ios
- HelloUsername 11mo agoRelated discussion? "Tales of Favicons and Caches: Persistent Tracking in Modern Browsers" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25868742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25868742 53 comments on 22-jan-2021
- Strongbad536 11mo agoProbably not a popular opinion here but i'm honestly impressed that someone made this work?
- alentred 11mo agoThere is ad money at stake, and it is unfortunately one of the key revenue models in the modern web. I don't know if this particular research was sponsored by ad-tech or if it's preventive, but it shouldn't be generally surprising that this kind of things are heavily researched.
- martin_a 11mo agoNeeds a (2023) addition in the title
- Barbing 11mo agoReminds me I noticed macOS Safari pulling in the favicons somewhat frequently when I load the new tab page with favorites on it. Definitely something I don't want. Maybe I should just remove the favorites or maybe I can save them as redirects or HTML or something. Note I use private windows most often & shoutout Little Snitch for driving the discovery.
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11mo agoPrevious comments (2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26051370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26051370
- tomhow 11mo agoThanks! Supercookie: Browser Fingerprinting via Favicon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26051370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26051370 - Feb 2021 (81 comments)
- NooneAtAll3 11mo agoI don't understand the live demo it gave me some ID, but how do I test that some different website can track me resulting in same ID? or is it only "detect private browsing/container on same browser" kind of stuff?
- xandrius 11mo agoI just got a refresh per second and a counter from 1/18 to 18/18 and repeat. Feels like I wasted 20s.
- scrps 11mo agoNonpersistent vm-based browser, I use qemu + cage + firefox and some glue logic to fire up a copy of a base image which gets deleted on exit. Fires up slower than a native firefox instance but runs all the same. Can containerize for the less paranoid and less work but browsers touching host kernel gives me the ick as does the idea of trying to write ebpf policies for firefox to mitigate. Browsers are pain.
- captainkrtek 11mo agoThis sounds interesting, do you have this written up anywhere?
- scrps 11mo agoI sadly do not atm beyond some notes but I can if there is interest.
- ghxst 11mo agoTried a similar approach but found that putting the browser in a VM has a tendency to expose a few data points that stand out as less trust worthy which means you end up getting a lot of captchas on some websites (like using swiftshader for renderer, not having some fonts installed, among other things), lying about these can typically be detected as well (like injecting noise into a canvas, modifying the advertised renderer). If you've found any solutions to these please share.
- scrps 11mo agoWhat approach did you end up going with instead?
- musicale 11mo agoI have never liked how Safari always tries to reload favicons. Seems like an obvious and annoying privacy leak.
- VladVladikoff 11mo agoThis is great, I needed more tools for tracking bad users who have been banned and try to ban evade. I have been using Samy Kamkars evercookie which is pretty good but some of the techniques are dated.
- mmooss 11mo ago(2023) per readme.md date (2021) per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45948731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45948731
- efficax 11mo agodid anyone ever make use of this in practice? 32 redirects to construct a unique id seems very impractical
- vlovich123 11mo agoAd networks don’t care. It’s a data leak. Even a few extra bits can be valuable to tag you with a better uid.
- tamimio 11mo agoCan’t wait for this to be abused and linked to your digital ID through the wallet app!
- Catagris 11mo agoNice to see Brave patched it though.
- cachius 11mo ago1st patch: https://github.com/brave/brave-core/commits/master/patches/components-history-core-browser-thumbnail_database.cc.patch https://github.com/brave/brave-core/commits/master/patches/c... Rename thumbnail to favicon: https://github.com/brave/brave-core/commits/master/patches/components-favicon-core-favicon_database.cc.patch https://github.com/brave/brave-core/commits/master/patches/c... Then abandoned in favor of Chromium including favicons in the regular cache https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45954466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45954466
- jmward01 11mo agoAt some point we need actual consequences for sites that intentionally hide their tracking. It should be criminal. It is stalking and has real world consequences. Just because an exploit exists doesn't mean it should be used. That logic is like saying it is OK to break into a house because the lock on the door was weak. If we don't get real protections, at what point does it become justified to go offensive against sites that exploit things like this? If I found someone putting trackers on me with the intent to sell that information (harm me) I would defend myself. When am I allowed to do that in the digital world? Quick side note here. I appreciate the research calling this out. We need to know the dangers out there to figure out how to protect ourselves, especially since governments don't seem to take this seriously.
- bravoetch 11mo agoI think two things keep the status quo where the end-user is exploited and attacked constantly. The first is the VC / Startup model. Because VC is the true customer, and not the end-user. The second is the current marketing and advertising model. Can it keep working well enough to be worth the money? When it's not, the bottom falls out. Old business model: solve a problem for your customer, add some value, take home a cut. Current business model: solve investment return for your investors, get the returns by addicting your end-user to something they don't need. Future business model: ?
- halapro 11mo ago> The first is the VC / Startup model. Because VC is the true customer, and not the end-user. I don't see how that's related? Anyone looking to increase their revenue looks at tracking. Even I, with my popular open source projects, receive emails to add tracking, let alone business that need money to pay their employees.
- dragochat 11mo agoIf you visit my eg. physical clothing store I'm allowed to monitor your in-shop behavior to better optimize my store for your needs. Same for a restaurant etc. That's how _you_ get _much improved services_ and I get _happier customers_. Ofc I'm not allowed to freaking resell that data. THIS is the problem in online: releseling and data-brokers. Just KILL these categories of businesses off completely and make _them_ criminal (like even give f prison sentences to their operators). We should get back to our sanity in ONLINE. As long as you're on _my (online) property_ and using _my services_ I can of course see EVERYTHING you f do, and should stop pretending I don't (as a business, ofc - anonymization exists and not any random employee can access any customer's data, probably should never access both data and identity correlated unless they're actively investigating some serious fraud). As long as I'm not sharing this data with anyone else, I should be 100% allowed to use every drop of this data to improve my services to you and totally differentiate myself from the incompetent competition that can't properly do this. Data privacy (from EU's GDPR to... everything else) only helps big corporations fend-off competition from small startups or boutique shops that could easily out-compete them by offering hyper-personalized hand tailored micro-optimized experiences for their smaller number of customers based on the loads of data they collect from them. In the EU I've only ever seen these kinds of laws severely hamper small boutique or family businesses that wanted to hyperpersonalize to everyone's gain while big corpos easily surf around them with their teams of lawyers. ...we've all been brainwashed by this privacy psyop to sheepishly "fight for our privacy" in ways that are detrimental to us and only help our corporate oligarch overlords maintain an even tighter grip on power, while offering us worse and worse services. Wake the f up, DATA IS MEANT TO BE USED to IMPROVE goods and services, not remain uncollected or sit unused!
- sinuhe69 11mo agoDelete cookies and site data on Firefox works.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 11mo agoI use a browser that does not support favicon Wondering why users of popular browsers believe favicon is needed (I'm assuming users asked the authors of those browsers for favicon)
- shiomiru 11mo agoPopular browsers support tabs. When you have many tabs open, it's hard to show a meaningful title for each one. An icon takes up less place and is easier to scan for visually.
- 1718627440 11mo agoMozilla Firefox doesn't shrink tabs any further, but instead lets the tab list go off screen and you can scroll. I think that is a Google Chrome specific thing.
- shiomiru 11mo agoI've just tried and when I open a bunch of new tabs, Firefox truncates the "new tab" text to "new" and a Firefox logo. Same thing happens with other titles. (Then at some point it stops truncating and scrolls off the screen.)
- 1718627440 11mo agoThat's true, it's more without the favicon. It is configurable with browser.tabs.tabMinWidth. Not sure if it is configurable elsewhere in the UI, I normally don't bother with that.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 11mo agoDo tabs in the popular graphical browsers display a number on each tab by default This might be useful when switching from, e.g., tab#1 to tab#7, using keyboard shortcut Ctrl-7
- benob 11mo agoWhy doesn't this apply to any kind of cached content?
- nishantjani10 11mo agoThis is an insightful read. One question I have is, how do you ensure a user visits all of the N routes for the ID to be generate or to be verified on revisits.
- stingraycharles 11mo agoTotally unrelated, but what I found interesting: the README hasn’t been touched for years, yet it looks entirely AI generated. Including the commits. People actually wrote READMEs / commit messages like that before? Have I been living under a rock?
- dewey 11mo agoWhere do you think the AI training data comes from? Emoji-heavy documentation/commit messages always seem very popular in JS projects, as this is seems to be the project of a 12 (Edit: It's 20, misread) year old I'm not too surprised that it's a bit unusual compared to others.
- stingraycharles 11mo agoAh, I didn’t know this was made by a child, that makes sense then. I knew this was part of the JS community, I just didn’t realize AI was literally 1:1 using the same style. I guess didn’t realize that the NodeJS community was so dominant. Or maybe is it because the NodeJS community always had a style of “many small libraries”, which causes them to be over represented?
- hogdanish 11mo agoThe README.md says the author was twenty years old when it was written. Am I missing something here?
- dewey 11mo agoI read it as twelve. My bad!
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- stingraycharles 11mo agoFYI for anyone that cares: this attack vector has been patched by browsers years ago, fairly soon after this was released. https://github.com/jonasstrehle/supercookie/issues/30 https://github.com/jonasstrehle/supercookie/issues/30
- jgalt212 11mo agoThe link shows Chrome patched and unpatched this.
- mobeigi 11mo agoLovely attack vector. It's fun to open the various databases stored by browsers like Chrome in SQLITE to see the kind of information they store. I wouldn't be surprised if a similar attack vector existed for a different stored artefact.
- redbell 11mo agoThe urge to mine user's data in every possible way is being escalated to higher levels each day. We are, for sure, living in the data rush era. Another interesting method for web fingerprinting explored by a team of researchers back in 2022 uses the GPU to create unique fingerprints and uses them for persistent web tracking. Codenamed 'DrawnApart' [1] and relies on WebGL to count the number and speed of the execution units in the GPU, measure the time needed to complete vertex renders, handle stall functions, and more. It uses short GLSL programs executed by the target GPU as part of the vertex shader to overcome the challenge of having random execution units handling the computations. Hence, the workload allocation is predictable and standardized. __________ 1. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/researchers-use-gpu-fingerprinting-to-track-users-online/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/researchers-u...