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An Analysis of Modes in Modern Browsers

Gaurav Aggarwal Elie Bursztein Collin Jackson Dan Boneh Stanford University CMU Stanford University

Abstract Even within a single browser there are inconsistencies. We study the security and of private browsing For example, in 3.6, cookies set in public mode modes recently added to all major browsers. We first pro- are not available to the web site while the browser is in pose a clean definition of the goals of private browsing private mode. However, passwords and SSL cer- and survey its implementation in different browsers. We tificates stored in public mode are available while in pri- conduct a measurement study to determine how often it is vate mode. Since web sites can use the password man- used and on what categories of sites. Our results suggest ager as a crude cookie mechanism, the password policy that private browsing is used differently from how it is is inconsistent with the cookie policy. marketed. We then describe an automated technique for Browser plug-ins and extensions add considerable testing the security of private browsing modes and report complexity to private browsing. Even if a browser ad- on a few weaknesses found in the Firefox browser. Fi- equately implements private browsing, an extension can nally, we show that many popular browser extensions and completely undermine its privacy guarantees. In Sec- plugins undermine the security of private browsing. We tion 6.1 we show that many widely used extensions un- propose and experiment with a workable policy that lets dermine the goals of private browsing. For this reason, users safely run extensions in private browsing mode. Chrome disables all extensions while in private mode, negatively impacting the user experience. Firefox, 1 Introduction in contrast, allows extensions to run in private mode, fa- voring usability over security.

The four major browsers (, Firefox, Our contribution. The inconsistencies between the Chrome and ) recently added private browsing goals and implementation of private browsing suggests modes to their user interfaces. Loosely speaking, these that there is considerable room for research on private modes have two goals. First and foremost, sites visited browsing. We present the following contributions. while browsing in private mode should leave no trace on the user’s computer. A family member who examines the Threat model. We begin with a clear definition of • browser’s history should find no evidence of sites visited the goals of private browsing. Our model has two in private mode. More precisely, a local attacker who somewhat orthogonal goals: security against a local takes control of the machine at time T should learn no attacker (the primary goal of private browsing) and information about private browsing actions prior to time security against a web attacker. We show that cor- T . Second, users may want to hide their identity from rectly implementing private browsing can be non- web sites they visit by, for example, making it difficult trivial and in fact all browsers fail in one way or an- for web sites to link the user’s activities in private mode other. We then survey how private browsing is im- to the user’s activities in public mode. We refer to this as plemented in the four major browsers, highlighting privacy from a web attacker. the quirks and differences between the browsers. While all major browsers support private browsing, there is a great deal of inconsistency in the type of pri- Experiment. We conduct an experiment to test • vacy provided by the different browsers. Firefox and how private browsing is used. Our study is based Chrome, for example, attempt to protect against a local on a technique we discovered to remotely test if a attacker and take some steps to protect against a web at- browser is currently in private browsing mode. Us- tacker, while Safari only protects against a local attacker. ing this technique we post ads on ad-networks and determine how often private mode is used. Using ad actions. By restricting the local attacker to “after the targeting by the ad-network we target different cat- fact” forensics, we can hope to provide security by hav- egories of sites, enabling us to correlate the use of ing the browser adequately erase persistent state changes private browsing with the type of site being visited. during a private browsing session. We find it to be more popular at adult sites and less As we will see, this requirement is far from simple. popular at gift sites, suggesting that its primary pur- For one thing, not all state changes during private brows- pose may not be shopping for “surprise gifts.” We ing should be erased at the end of a private browsing ses- quantify our findings in Section 4. sion. We draw a distinction between four types of persis- tent state changes: Tools. We describe an automated technique for • identifying failures in private browsing implemen- 1. Changes initiated by a web site without any user in- tations and use it to discover a few weaknesses in teraction. A few examples in this category include the Firefox browser. setting a cookie, adding an entry to the history file, and adding data to the browser . Browser extensions. We propose an improve- • 2. Changes initiated by a web site, but requiring user ment to existing approaches to extensions in private interaction. Examples include generating a client browsing mode, preventing extensions from unin- certificate or adding a password to the password tentionally leaving traces of the private activity on database. disk. We implement our proposal as a Firefox ex- 3. Changes initiated by the user. For example, creating tension that imposes this policy on other extensions. a or downloading a file. 4. Non-user-specific state changes, such as installing a Organization. Section 2 presents a threat model for pri- browser patch or updating the phishing block list. vate browsing. Section 3 surveys private browsing mode in modern browsers. Section 4 describes our experimen- All browsers try to delete state changes in category (1) tal measurement of private browsing usage. Section 5 once a private browsing session is terminated. Failure to describes the weaknesses we found in existing private do so is treated as a private browsing violation. However, browsing implementations. Section 6 addresses the chal- changes in the other three categories are in a gray area lenges introduced by extensions and plug-ins. Section 7 and different browsers treat these changes differently and describes additional related work. Section 8 concludes. often inconsistently. We discuss implementations in dif- ferent browsers in the next section. 2 Private browsing: goal and threat model To keep our discussion general we use the term pro- tected actions to refer to state changes that should be In defining the goals and threat model for private brows- erased when leaving private browsing. It is up to each ing, we consider two types of attackers: an attacker who browser vendor to define the set of protected actions. controls the user’s machine (a local attacker) and an at- Network access. Another complication in defining pri- tacker who controls web sites that the user visits (a web vate browsing is server side violations of privacy. Con- attacker). We define security against each attacker in sider a web site that inadvertently displays to the world turn. In what follows we refer to the user browsing the the last login time of every user registered at the site. web in private browsing mode as the user and refer to Even if the user connects to the site while in private someone trying to determine information about the user’s mode, the user’s actions are open for anyone to see. In private browsing actions as the attacker. other words, web sites can easily violate the goals of pri- vate browsing, but this should not be considered a viola- 2.1 Local attacker tion of private browsing in the browser. Since we are focusing on browser-side security, our security model Stated informally, security against a local attacker means defined below ignores server side violations. While that an attacker who takes control of the machine after browser vendors mostly ignore server side violations, the user exits private browsing can learn nothing about one can envision a number of potential solutions: the user’s actions while in private browsing. We define this more precisely below. Much like the phishing filter, browsers can consult a • We emphasize that the local attacker has no access to block list of sites that should not be accessed while the user’s machine before the user exits private brows- in private browsing mode. ing. Without this limitation, security against a local at- Alternatively, sites can provide a P3P-like policy • tacker is impossible; an attacker who has access to the statement saying that they will not violate private user’s machine before or during a private browsing ses- browsing. While in private mode, the browser will sion can simply install a key-logger and record all user not connect to sites that do not display this policy. A non-technical solution is to post a privacy seal at Difficulties. Browser vendors face a number of chal- • web sites who comply with private browsing. Users lenges in securing private browsing against a local at- can avoid non-compliant sites when browsing pri- tacker. One set of problems is due to the underlying op- vately. erating system. We give two examples: First, when connecting to a remote site the browser Security is usually defined using two Security model. must resolve the site’s DNS name. Operating systems parameters: the attacker’s capabilities and the attacker’s often cache DNS resolutions in a local DNS cache. A goals. A local private browsing attacker has the follow- local attacker can examine the DNS cache and the TTL ing capabilities: values to learn if and when the user visited a particular The attacker does nothing until the user leaves pri- site. Thus, to properly implement private browsing, the • vate browsing mode at which point the attacker gets browser will need to ensure that all DNS queries while complete control of the machine. This captures in private mode do not affect the system’s DNS cache: the fact that the attacker is limited to after-the-fact no entries should be added or removed. A more aggres- forensics. sive solution, supported in Windows 2000 and later, is to flush the entire DNS resolver cache when exiting private In this paper we focus on persistent state violations, browsing. None of the mainstream browsers currently such as those stored on disk; we ignore private state address this issue. left in memory. Thus, we assume that before the attacker takes over the local machine all volatile Second, the can swap memory memory is cleared (though data on disk, including to the swap partition on disk which can leave traces of the the hibernation file, is fair game). Our reason for ig- user’s activity. To test this out we performed the follow- noring volatile memory is that erasing all of it when ing experiment on Ubuntu 9.10 running Firefox 3.5.9: exiting private browsing can be quite difficult and, 1. We rebooted the machine to clear RAM and setup indeed, no browser does it. We leave it as future and mounted a swap file (zeroed out). work to prevent privacy violations resulting from 2. Next, we started Firefox, switched to private brows- volatile memory. ing mode, browsed some and exited pri- While active, the attacker cannot communicate with vate mode but kept Firefox running. • network elements that contain information about the 3. Once the browser was in public mode, we ran a user’s activities while in private mode (e.g. web memory leak program a few times to force memory sites the user visited, caching proxies, etc.). This pages to be swapped out. We then ran strings captures the fact that we are studying the implemen- on the swap file and searched for specific words tation of browser-side privacy modes, not server- and content of the webpages visited while in private side privacy. mode. The experiment showed that the swap file contained Given these capabilities, the attacker’s goal is as fol- some URLs of visited websites, embedded in those lows: for a set S of HTTP requests of the attacker’s pages and sometimes even the text from a page – enough choosing, determine if the browser issued any of those information to learn about the user’s activity in private requests while in private browsing mode. More precisely, browsing. the attacker is asked to distinguish a private browsing This experiment shows that a full implementation of session where the browser makes one of the requests in private browsing will need to prevent browser memory S from a private browsing session where the browser pages from being swapped out. None of the mainstream does not. If the local attacker cannot achieve this goal browsers currently do this. then we say that the browser’s implementation of private browsing is secure. This will be our working definition Non-solutions. At first glance it may seem that secu- throughout the paper. Note that since an HTTP request rity against a local attacker can be achieved using virtual contains the name of the domain visited this definition machine snapshots. The browser runs on top of a vir- implies that the attacker cannot tell if the user visited a tual machine monitor (VMM) that takes a snapshot of the particular site (to see why set S to be the set of all pos- browser state whenever the browser enters private brows- sible HTTP requests to the site in question). Moreover, ing mode. When the user exits private browsing the even if by some auxiliary information the attacker knows VMM restores the browser, and possibly other OS data, that the user visited a particular site, the definition im- to its state prior to entering private mode. This architec- plies that the attacker cannot tell what the user did at the ture is unacceptable to browser vendors for several rea- site. We do not formalize properties of private browsing sons: first, a browser security update installed during pri- in case the user never exits private browsing mode. vate browsing will be undone when exiting private mode; second, documents manually downloaded and saved to Goal 3: A web site should not be able to determine • the file system during private mode will be lost when ex- whether the browser is currently in private browsing iting private mode, causing user frustration; and third, mode. While this is a desirable goal, all browsers manual tweaks to browser settings (e.g. the homepage fail to satisfy this; we describe a generic attack in URL, visibility status of toolbars, and bookmarks) will Section 4. revert to their earlier settings when exiting private mode. Goals (1) and (2) are quite difficult to achieve. At For all these reasons and others, a complete restore of the the very least, the browser’s IP address can help to its state when entering private mode is not the sites link users across private browsing boundaries. Even desired behavior. Only browser state that reveals infor- if we ignore IP addresses, a web site can use various mation on sites visited should be deleted. browser features to fingerprint a particular browser and User profiles provide a lightweight approach to imple- track that browser across privacy boundaries. Mayer [14] menting the VM snapshot method described above. User describes a number of such features, such as screen reso- profiles store all browser state associated with a partic- lution, installed plug-ins, timezone, and installed fonts, ular user. Firefox, for example, supports multiple user all available through standard JavaScript objects. The profiles and the user can choose a profile when start- Electronic Frontier Foundation recently built a web site ing the browser. The browser can make a backup of the called Panopticlick [6] to demonstrate that most browsers user’s profile when entering private mode and restore the can be uniquely fingerprinted. Their browser fingerprint- profile to its earlier state when exiting private mode. This ing technology completely breaks private browsing goals mechanism, however, suffers from all the problems men- (1) and (2) in all browsers. tioned above. Torbutton [29] — a client implemented as a Fire- Rather than a snapshot-and-restore approach, all four fox extension — puts considerable effort into achieving major browsers take the approach of not recording cer- goals (1) and (2). It hides the client’s IP address using the tain data while in private mode (e.g. the history file is Tor network and takes steps to prevent browser finger- not updated) and deleting other data when exiting pri- printing. This functionality is achieved at a considerable vate mode (e.g. cookies). As we will see, some data that performance and convenience cost to the user. should be deleted is not.

2.2 Web attacker 3 A survey of private browsing in modern browsers Beyond a local attacker, browsers attempt to provide some privacy from web sites. Here the attacker does not All four majors browsers (Internet Explorer 8, Firefox control the user’s machine, but has control over some vis- 3.5, Safari 4, and 5) implement a private ited sites. There are three orthogonal goals that browsers browsing mode. This feature is called InPrivate in In- try to achieve to some degree: ternet Explorer, Private Browsing in Firefox and Safari, and Incognito in Chrome. Goal 1: A web site cannot link a user visiting • in private mode to the same user visiting in pub- User interface. Figure 1 shows the user interface associ- lic mode. Firefox, Chrome, and IE implement this ated with these modes in each of the browsers. Chrome (partially) by making cookies set in public mode un- and Internet Explorer have obvious chrome indicators available while in private mode, among other things that the browser is currently in private browsing mode, discussed in the next section. Interestingly, Safari while the Firefox indicator is more subtle and Safari only ignores the web attacker model and makes public displays the mode in a pull down menu. The difference cookies available in private browsing. in visual indicators has to do with shoulder surfing: can a casual observer tell if the user is currently browsing Goal 2: A web site cannot link a user in one private privately? Safari takes this issue seriously and provides • session to the same user in another private session. no visual indicator in the browser chrome, while other More precisely, consider the following sequence of browsers do provide a persistent indicator. We expect visits at a particular site: the user visits in public that hiding the visual indicator causes users who turn on mode, then enters private mode and visits again, ex- private browsing to forget to turn it off. We give some ev- its private mode and visits again, re-activates pri- idence of this phenomenon in Section 4 where we show vate mode and visits again. The site should not that the percentage of users who browse the web in pri- be able to link the two private sessions to the same vate mode is greater in browsers with subtle visual indi- user. Browsers implement this (partially) by delet- cators. ing cookies set while in private mode, as well as Another fundamental difference between the browsers other restrictions discussed in the next section. is how they start private browsing. IE and Chrome spawn a new window while keeping old windows open, thus private mode this data will be erased. The browser’s allowing the user to simultaneously use the two modes. web cache is handled similarly. We note that among the Firefox does not allow mixing the two modes. When en- four browsers, only Firefox stores the list of downloaded tering private mode it hides all open windows and spawns items in private mode. This list is cleared on leaving pri- a new private browsing window. Unhiding public win- vate mode. dows does nothing since all tabs in these windows are frozen while browsing privately. Safari simply switches 3.1 A few initial privacy violation examples the current window to private mode and leaves all tabs unchanged. In Section 5.1 we describe tests of private browsing mode that revealed several browser attributes that persist after Internal behavior. To document how the four imple- a private browsing session is terminated. Web sites that mentations differ, we tested a variety of browser fea- use any of these features leave tracks on the user’s ma- tures that maintain state and observed the browsers’ han- chine that will enable a local attacker to determine the dling of each feature in conjunction with private brows- user’s activities in private mode. We give a few exam- ing mode. The results, conducted on using a ples below. default browser settings, are summarized in 1, 2 and 3. Custom Handler Protocol. Firefox implements an Table 1 studies the types of data set in public mode HTML 5 feature called custom protocol handlers (CPH) that are available in private mode. Some browsers block that enables a web site to define custom protocols, data set in public mode to make it harder for web sites to namely URLs of the form xyz://site/path where link the private user to the pubic user (addressing the web xyz is a custom protocol name. We discovered that cus- attacker model). The Safari column in Table 1 shows tom protocol handlers defined while the browser is in that Safari ignores the web attacker model altogether and private mode persist after private browsing ends. Con- makes all public data available in private mode except sequently, sites that use this feature will leak the fact that for the web cache. Firefox, IE, and Chrome block ac- the user visited these sites to a local attacker. cess to some public data while allowing access to other Client Certificate. IE, Firefox, and Safari support SSL data. All three make public history, bookmarks and pass- client certificates. A web site can, using JavaScript, in- words available in private browsing, but block public struct the browser to generate an SSL client public/pri- cookies and HTML5 local storage. Firefox allows SSL vate key pair. We discovered that all these browsers re- client certs set in public mode to be used in private mode, tain the generated key pair even after private browsing thus enabling a web site to link the private session to the ends. Again, if the user visits a site that generates an user’s public session. Hence, Firefox’s client cert pol- SSL client key pair, the resulting keys will leak the site’s icy is inconsistent with its cookie policy. IE differs from identity to the local attacker. When Internet Explorer and the other three browsers in the policy for form field auto- Safari encounter a self-signed certificate they store it in completion; it allows using data from public mode. a certificate vault. We discovered that entries Table 2 studies the type of data set in private mode added to the vault while in private mode remain in the that persists after the user leaves private mode. A lo- vault when the private session ends. Hence, if the user cal attacker can use data that persists to learn user ac- visits a site that is using a self signed certificate, that in- tions in private mode. All four browsers block cook- formation will be available to the local attacker even after ies, history, and HTML5 local storage from propagating the user leaves private mode. to public mode, but persist bookmarks and downloads. Note that all browsers other than Firefox persist server SMB Query. Since Internet Explorer shares some un- self-signed certificates approved by the user while in pri- derlying components with Window Explorer it under- vate browsing mode. Lewis [35] recently pointed that stands SMB naming conventions such as \\host\ Chrome 5.0.375.38 persisted the window zoom level for mydir\myfile and allows the user to browse files and URLs across incognito sessions; this issue has been fixed directories. This feature has been used before to steal as of Chrome 5.0.375.53. user data [16]. Here we point out that SMB can also be Table 3 studies data that is entered in private mode and used to undo some of the benefits of private browsing persists during that same private mode session. While mode. Consider the following code : in private mode, Firefox writes nothing to the history database and similarly no new passwords and no search terms are saved. However, cookies are stored in mem- When IE renders this tag, it initiates an SMB request to ory while in private mode and erased when the user ex- the whose IP is specified in the image source. ists private mode. These cookies are not written to per- Part of the SMB request is an NTLM authentication that sistent storage to ensure that if the browser crashes in works as follows: first an anonymous connection is tried (a) Google Chrome 4 (b) Internet Explorer 8

(c) Firefox 3.6 (d) Safari 4

Figure 1: Private browsing indicators in major browsers FF Safari Chrome IE History no yes no no Cookies no yes no no HTML5 local storage no yes no no Bookmarks yes yes yes yes Password database yes yes yes yes Form autocompletion yes yes yes no User approved SSL self-signed cert yes yes yes yes Downloaded items list no yes yes n/a Downloaded items yes yes yes yes Search box search terms yes yes yes yes Browser’s web cache no no no no Client certs yes yes yes yes Custom protocol handlers yes n/a n/a n/a Per-site zoom level no n/a yes n/a

Table 1: Is the state set in earlier public mode(s) accessible in private mode?

FF Safari Chrome IE History no no no no Cookies no no no no HTML5 Local storage no no no no Bookmarks yes yes yes yes Password database no no no no Form autocompletion no no no no User approved SSL self-signed cert no yes yes yes Downloaded items list no no no n/a Downloaded items yes yes yes yes Search box search terms no no no no Browser’s web cache no no no no Client certs yes n/a n/a yes Custom protocol handlers yes n/a n/a n/a Per-site zoom level no n/a no n/a

Table 2: Is the state set in earlier private mode(s) accessible in public mode?

FF Safari Chrome IE History no no no no Cookies yes yes yes yes HTML5 Local storage yes yes yes yes Bookmarks yes yes yes yes Password database no no no no Form autocompletion no no no no User approved SSL self-signed cert yes yes yes yes Downloaded items list yes no no n/a Downloaded items yes yes yes yes Search box search terms no no no no Browser’s web cache yes yes yes yes Client certs yes n/a n/a yes Custom protocol handlers yes n/a n/a n/a Per-site zoom level no n/a yes n/a

Table 3: Is the state set in private mode at some point accessible later in the same session? and if it fails IE starts a challenge-response negotiation. users can disable the :visited pseudotag using a Fire- IE also sends to the server Windows username, Windows fox preference used as a defense against history sniffing. domain name, Windows computer name even when the Again, this will make us think they are in private mode. browser is in InPrivate mode. Even if the user is behind a We excluded beta versions of Firefox 3.7 and Chrome 6 proxy, clears the browser state, and uses InPrivate, SMB from our experiment, since these browsers have experi- connections identify the user to the remote site. While mental visited link defenses that prevent our automated experimenting with this we found that many ISPs filter experiment from working. However, we note that these the SMB port 445 which makes this attack difficult in defenses are not sufficient to prevent web attackers from practice. detecting private browsing, since they are not designed to be robust against attacks that involve user interaction [3]. We also note that the experiment only measures the pres- 4 Usage measurement ence of private mode, not the intent of private mode— some users may be in private mode without realizing it. We conducted an experiment to determine how the choice of browser and the type of site being browsed af- Results. The results of our ad network experiment are fects whether users enable private browsing mode. We shown in Figure 2. We found that private browsing was used advertisement networks as a delivery mechanism more popular at adult web sites than at gift shopping sites for our measurement code, using the same ad network and news sites, which shared a roughly equal level of pri- and technique previously demonstrated in [10, 4]. vate browsing use. This observation suggests that some browser vendors may be mischaracterizing the primary Design. We ran two simultaneous one-day campaigns: use of the feature when they describe it as a tool for buy- a campaign that targeted adult sites, and a campaign ing surprise gifts [8, 17]. that targeted gift shopping sites. We also ran a cam- We also found that private browsing was more com- paign on news sites as a control. We spent $120 to pur- monly used in browsers that displayed subtle private chase 155,216 impressions, split evenly as possible be- browsing indicators. Safari and Firefox have subtle in- tween the campaigns. Our advertisement detected pri- dicators and enforce a single mode across all windows; vate browsing mode by visiting a unique URL in an they had the highest rate of private browsing use. Google