Who left open the cookie jar?
Tom Van Goethem at Global AppSec Tel Aviv 2019
Nowadays, cookies are the most prominent mechanism to identify and authenticate users on the Internet. Although facilitating important usability advances, they also opened the door to cross-site attacks and third-party tracking. Various countermeasures have been developed as a reaction to these threats, such as built-in browser policies and extensions that block undesirable requests and cookies.
However, these countermeasures are rarely questioned on their effectiveness. Motivated by this, we developed a framework to evaluate these countermeasures in an automated manner, spanning 8 browsers, and 46 ad blockers and privacy extensions. Unfortunately, our comprehensive evaluation uncovered that virtually every policy can be bypassed.
In this talk, we explore various interesting bypasses to built-in browser policies and extensions. Furthermore, we argue that our framework is a much-needed tool for evaluating browser policies. We illustrate that our framework can be expanded to evaluate other policy implementations such as Content Security Policy and private browsing mode.
Tom Van Goethem
imec-DistriNet - KU Leuven
Tom Van Goethem is a PhD student at the University of Leuven with a keen interest in web security and privacy. In his research, Tom likes performing large-scale security experiments, whether to analyze the presence of good and bad practices on the web, or to demystify security claims.
However, these countermeasures are rarely questioned on their effectiveness. Motivated by this, we developed a framework to evaluate these countermeasures in an automated manner, spanning 8 browsers, and 46 ad blockers and privacy extensions. Unfortunately, our comprehensive evaluation uncovered that virtually every policy can be bypassed.
In this talk, we explore various interesting bypasses to built-in browser policies and extensions. Furthermore, we argue that our framework is a much-needed tool for evaluating browser policies. We illustrate that our framework can be expanded to evaluate other policy implementations such as Content Security Policy and private browsing mode.
Tom Van Goethem
imec-DistriNet - KU Leuven
Tom Van Goethem is a PhD student at the University of Leuven with a keen interest in web security and privacy. In his research, Tom likes performing large-scale security experiments, whether to analyze the presence of good and bad practices on the web, or to demystify security claims.