They really gave internet browsers too much access. Why the fuck does my browser need this level of clearance
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“Google says fingerprinting is not a security vulnerability”. That is a very google thing to say.
I looked it up - Firefox does not allow OFPS storage in private mode since November 2022 , so that is an option at least.
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I wonder if, at any point, anyone stopped to ask themselves, "did I really go to school just so I can ply my knowledge and expertise to find even more ways to fucking track people who expressly don't want to be tracked so we can use the data for ad revenue (if not for other, even worse things)"?
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The attack creates a large OPFS file on the victim's SSD, with both Chrome and Safari allowing a website to claim up to 60% of total disk space through OPFS, which on a 256GB drive is over 150GB.
Am I reading this right? 60% of all your disk space can be confiscated by some random web site? I gotta figure out how to get my browser cache onto some tiny partition.
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In this case, I agree that it’s a low priority patch. Here’s what you must do as an attacker. Decide for yourself whether it sounds practical for general deployment.
Requirements: Fill OPFS storage with an arbitrarily large amount of data which at least exceeds RAM, but may require up to 60% of SSD, then lock up a thread with random reads while a worker thread hosts a model that you feed any detected latency clusters.
Even if users don’t notice their fans maxing / battery burning / memory+storage disappearing and kill the tab themselves, this definitely will be the first tab offloaded by most browsers and OSes shortly after it is sent to the background.
That means you have a brief window where you might get the chance to guess which sites a user is visiting. Your guess is likely far less than 89% accurate (PoCs illustrate in optimal conditions where models are often deliberately overfit to specific machine(s) and locale) outside a hyper-targeted attack, you will be lucky for coin toss levels of certainty for any guess.
Is this an attractive attack vector?
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then I guess it's time we go back to terminal browsing. text based sites here we come.
The actual paper (PDF) this is based on gives much better information than the article. From that we get some really key information:
To allow FROST to measure SSD contention, the victim must perform activities that result in storage accesses to the same disk as the file used for contention measurement
This can't ready your SSD. It can only listen in on the conversation between your CPU and SSD when something else reads it or writes to it. The whole FROST approach has a number of clever tricks to generate reads from open applications though. Further, it requires the attacker's code to be running in an active browser session.
Also, If you have two SSDs, and your browser is on one, this FROST approach can't see anything written to or read from on the other SSD.
Lastly, there's a mention in the paper about hardware based SSD encryption being vulnerable, there's no mention of Software Whole Disk Encryption. Given how the researchers are using the SSD timing exploit, I would guess that a software (not hardware) whole disk encryption might be immune to this attack because the patterns of timings would be different with encrypted data being written to the SSD (instead of the data being encrypted by the SSD when written.
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Good i dont allow every Javascript on websites (usually)
So the file has to exceed available RAM to benchmark the SSD performance? How viable is that at all? You'd be downloading gigabytes.
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I remember when browsers just showed text.
We should just throw away the web and do something new. Maybe Fidonet over Reticulum so we can use radio.
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