Beta Version of Nevercookie Released 77
wiredmikey writes "Anonymizer has released a beta version of Nevercookie, the recently announced Firefox plugin designed to protect against the Evercookie, a JavaScript API built and made available to prove that the more you store and the more places you store it, the harder it is for users to control a Web site's ability to uniquely identify their computer. Evercookie is a more persistent form of cookie that enables the storage of cookie data in a number of different locations, such as Flash cookies and various locations of HTML5 storage. This allows websites to track user behavior even when users have enabled private browsing. Because an Evercookie stores data in locations outside of where standard cookies are stored, an Evercookie can rebuild itself unless users go through a number of steps to completely clear and reset their local storage."
Excellent.. (Score:2, Insightful)
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Or it will get integrated into Firefox's private browsing feature.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Excellent.. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's worth remembering that everything a corporation tracks and stores is subject to subpoena or outright theft by the US Government. Tracking isn't ephemeral. There are increasingly large "profiles" of you being stored in databases of some very large corporations and if you really believe that those are safe and secure from prying eyes, whether it's employees of those companies, insurance companies that want nothing more than can charge you more or drop your policy, or government agencies who are convinced you're a threat to national security, you're sadly mistaken.
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Cat and mouse (Score:1, Insightful)
How long till EverEverCookie?
But kudos to the developers and ff (I am sure other browsers are not too far).
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Trace busta-busta-busta!
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Wrong! Hi John - how's that infected toe doing?
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If you don't want to be tracked (Score:3, Interesting)
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Problem is if you have a relatively fixed IP (and many do) they can track you via IP and domain name, cookies aren't the only way to track you.
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EFF's Panopticlick demonstrates that IP mobility is only a start, too.
The right way to be free is either to be an evil haxxor criminal who steals machine time
or
To have very stock machines and VMs dedicated to individual privacy-intensive applications, and never cross the streams.
Ignoring extremely determined opponents, though, finding effective ways to defeat advances in craplets and cookies is a very good start, though.
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http://linuxers.org/article/browser-fingerprinting-technique-identify-users-without-using-cookies [linuxers.org]
Re:If you don't want to be tracked (Score:5, Insightful)
They can fingerprint you based on your OS, system fonts, plug-ins, IP address, screen resolution and other exposed hardware capabilities, time zone, etc. Then they can surveil you as you move around the Web and increase the strength of that fingerprint based on the sites you visit that are in their "network" (think about how many properties Google owns from search to gmail to docs to youtube to blogger but then remember also that they can see you at non-googel sites because of adsense and google analytics and youtube embeds and feedburner and sites with re-captcha or google checkout or maps mash-ups or google's site-specific searches.
You are not anonymous, even if you rebuild your VM every day. You'd have to randomize all the features of your OS and your browser and then you'd have to reboot between pretty much every website you visit.
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"You'd have to randomize all the features of your OS and your browser and then you'd have to reboot between pretty much every website you visit."
Precisely why I simply sneak into my neighbors' houses and use their devices to do my nefarious deeds on the Internet.
Of course my plan will be foiled when an anomalous trend of interest in infectious diseases, video games and free thumbnail porn presents itself in geographic disproportion and is noticed by a Google algorithm specifically designed to search out suc
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No need to have a virtual machine for this. You can browse in the 'InPrivate Browsing" mode in IE8 which does the same thing.
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A useful virus (Score:3, Insightful)
For just once, can someone design a trojan/worm that updates browsers to include useful addons like this instead of trying to steal banking information? Just sayin'.
Keep your hands to yourself. (Score:4, Insightful)
For just once, can someone design a trojan/worm that updates browsers to include useful addons like this instead of trying to steal banking information? Just sayin'.
Tell me how you quarantee an innocent and useful payload.
Tell me why geek the who unleashes a trojan has won the right to decide how users should manage their systems.
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Tell me why geek the who unleashes a trojan has won the right to decide how users should manage their systems.
You would rather have a 500 page government mandate, oversight committee, legion of overpriced crappy software products designed to cure said artificial problem, and large numbers of cheap knock-offs stuffed with malware and advertisements to do it instead?
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Nostrodamus eat your heart out (Score:5, Funny)
How did we get into this mess? (Score:1, Insightful)
You could always disable cookies. Then the website requires cookies, and if you really want to use it, you accept cookies. The browsers could have had a setting that said, "delete cookies when navigating away from a domain in this list", but they didn't do that. So. I guess that's how we got into this mess.
As for browsers allowing a cookie to set stuff in obscure locations all over the system; that sounds like a bug that should have been fixed a long time ago. As for allowing 3rd parties to access cooki
Pass the popcorn (Score:3, Interesting)
blargh (Score:4, Insightful)
SeaMonkey (Score:4, Interesting)
Delete all the cookies you want (Score:5, Informative)
Your system's clock skew fingerprint [theinternetpatrol.com] will give you away, with a tiny bit of Javascript. Who needs cookies, when your computer has intrinsic characteristics / artifacts from manufacturing that uniquely identify it?
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Nobody in their right mind who cares about privacy is going to run random javascript without having any clue what it does.
Not really true. Even people who run with JS disabled and only enable it for specific sites where they consider it useful or necessary mostly don't inspect that JS to see what it's doing. And, there are plenty of people who think they care about privacy who don't even know that JS is a threat. Many think "well, I cleared my cookies, that's good enough." These people are both in their right mind and care about privacy. They just don't, and shouldn't be expected, to know how to, and for every site they visit,
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Yes, that is precisely what he is saying. There are people out there who think it should be perfectly acceptable to sniff wireless to collect data simply because it's out there or that the encryption wasn't strong enough.
The reality is that this sort of arms race can escalate indefinitely --> new techniques followed by new counter-measures followed by newer techniques and on and on. People who keep up will continue to diminish in numbers until "critical mass" has been achieved (which it already has I a
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This is like the billionth time I've posted it but...
JAVASCRIPT IS THE DEATH OF THE WEB
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Disabling TCP timestamps doesn't remove the underlying problem, or prevent a Javascript from discovering the local system clock's fingerprint.
You would need to modify the Javascript interpreter for that and somehow introduce unpredictable amounts of 'error' in timing operations.
And modifying the Flash interpreter would be nigh impossible, since only Adobe has the source code
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Or modify the OS clock functions. Few people need that level of precision and a smart modification could average out to zero deviation over the long term. One could even an add an interface to remove skew randomization for specific processes that way the user who cares about such things could "fix" it on a case by case basis.
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NTP solves that issue. If you're extra paranoid, sync your clock more often. If you're extra extra paranoid disable your ntp daemon and put this in root's crontab instead:
SHELL=/bin/bash
*/15 * * * * sleep $(($RANDOM%900)) && ntpdate pool.ntp.org
This syncs your clock every fifteen minutes with a random delay of fifteen minutes. It is also overkill.
Also note that while tor [torproject.org] continues to be slow as molasses, its latency may help defeat this kind of identification for any properly synched syste
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Periodically stepping your clock is pretty bad, will break a number of applications, especially when NTP steps your clock backwards, it does not erase fingerprints. And 'ntpdate' is only really meant to set your clock initially when it is still too far off to sync, once your clock is accurate, you should start the NTP daemon.
Anyways, NTP and ntpdate will not be able to hide the signature. There are sub-second timing methods available to Javascript that do not rely on the time reflected by the system cl
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hm, that's a really old story (I had assumed it was new because I saw I somewhere else today as well) dating back to 2005. Here's the full abstract with links to the full paper in PDF: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/yoshi/papers/PDF/ [washington.edu]
I see no sample code, and the paper was too verbose for me to quickly skim to find how it does its measurements, but the conclusion sticks out a bit:
Although the techniques we described will likely remain applicable to current generation systems, we suspect that future generation security systems might offer countermeasures to resist some of the finger-printing techniques that we uncover.
I think five years counts as more than fair with respect to a 'future generation' or two. Even if the paper was being o
Response paper: Skewmask (Score:2)
Isolated browsing (Score:5, Interesting)
I have been using, for many years, a script that was originally intended to defeat Firefox's attempt to always run all browser windows under the same process. The method used is to create a fake home directory and populate it with some data that was derived from a "first run" of Firefox. The script applies a few tweaks to make the paths match the dynamically generated fake home directory. Firefox believes it is the home directory. It doesn't go so far to double check this in /etc/passwd or such ... why would Firefox want to be that pedantic. If I had to, I could go a step further and defeat even that.
The intent of that script was to keep Firefox from getting overly bloated by allowing me to full quit (exit the process) for each site visited, without killing the windows of other sites I am still currently visiting. In some cases, some sites have triggered bugs, or caused lockups. I can kill the browser for that site (if it didn't crash on its own), still keeping the windows of other sites. It might seem counter-intuitive to many, but this does work to keep the bloat level down. At least it does so with my style of browsing (I keep a number of individual sites up in a browser sometimes for weeks).
One effect I did notice early on is that tracking was not happening if I quit a browser for one site and later started a new one to return. All the old cookies disappeared when the reaper component of the script cleaned up the leftover fake home directories. Cross site tracking wasn't happening as long as I started a new browser for each site, which I usually did, except when following links (in which case, they can get a referrer URL which I have not yet bothered to suppress). Referrers are sometimes useful (like to get a special pass through a paywall when coming from a partner site).
If it turns out that Firefox is so leaky that cookies can be placed outside of the context of the fake home directory, then I'll just have to raise the stakes and use a chroot directory (definitely not secure once arbitrary code can be run), or go even further and use either BSD Jails or Linux Containers (LXC, based on kernel cgroups). That will just mean I have to hard link in some more libraries from a read-only bind mount or some such thing. Maybe I'd even have to make truly real home directories for user dynamically added to /etc/passwd or something. It might add several milliseconds to the Firefox start time. Hopefully, if that happens, the Firefox developers will realize they have holes and get them fixed.
In any event, there's plenty more room to raise even higher walls between instances, even concurrently, of Firefox. We'll go where we need to go. There's only so far that the scumbag versions of web developers can go with this.
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Actually, I am one of those 'scum bag developers' that uses tracking technology to prevent cheating on an HTTP browser based mmorpg.
What you describe is not enough. You need to consider fingerprinting (use any extensions? you're probably easy to identify! Keep a website history at all? More info if you run javascript!) And, of course, there is the IP problem, but I'm sure you've considered something that basic.
Needless to say, the only way to cheat on this mmorpg is to forge headers... and good luck having
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Basic tracking within the site is not my real concern. If you have users login, you can also track them quite well by that means. Isn't that good enough?
I am concerned about cross-site tracking. I'm concerned about a lot of other things like browsers getting too obese because they let their memory get and stay fragmented. A lot of the solutions are the same. And a lot of the solutions can impact things like tracking within the site.
Where intra-site tracking can be a problem is methods you develop that
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If it turns out that Firefox is so leaky that cookies can be placed outside of the context of the fake home directory, then I'll just have to raise the stakes and use a chroot directory (definitely not secure once arbitrary code can be run),
(A) Flash cookies go in ~/.macromedia - I haven't played with changing $HOME yet to see if that is sufficient to make flash use different .macromedia directories, instead I use the BetterPrivacy plugin set to wipe flash cookies older than 5 minutes.
(B) Why do you think chroot is vulnerable to arbitrary code? AFAIK only root can break out of a chroot.
(C) Much, if not all, of what you describe can be done with firefox profiles. I run firefox with the "-no-remote -ProfileManager" arguments to get different c
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And once you are running arbitrary code, finding ways to be root are within possibility. Not every program around is bug free.
BTW, I did use Firefox profiles, and it didn't work for what I was trying to do (which was NOT to block tracking). My solution did work. It just happened to have the side effect of disrupting tracking outside of the scope of how long one instance of the browser was allowed to run. Sure, my 40 days old browser process I access Slashdot with can let Slashdot track me around. But t
Not compatible with FF 4.0 (beta 6) (Score:2)
Not sure about earlier versions of 4.0, but it comes up as not compatible with Beta 6.
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Not sure about earlier versions of 4.0, but it comes up as not compatible with Beta 6.
Yes, it's not compatible with FF 4. I did this because I haven't had time to test it with that version. This is simply a limitation I put into the install.rdf file. If you want to give it a try on FF 4 you can download the extension, rename it to .zip and open it up. Edit the install.rdf file and change this line: 3.9.* to something like 9.9.* or whatever you like. Zip the contents back up (do not zip the parent directory, you want to be zipping up content, locale, etc into one archive). If you zip it in a
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Why doesn't Firefox just block evercookies? (Score:2, Insightful)
Unless I'm reading this the wrong way, evercookies can exist because of flaws in HTML processing. So, why not do something to fill that hole instead of sticking a band-aid on it in the form of Nevercookie?
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So, why not do something to fill that hole instead of sticking a band-aid on it in the form of Nevercookie?
<mode type='cynical'>
Because that would endanger their Google funding?
</mode>
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Unless I'm reading this the wrong way, evercookies can exist because of flaws in HTML processing. So, why not do something to fill that hole instead of sticking a band-aid on it in the form of Nevercookie?
Flash isn't Mozilla's fault, so Firefox can't "fix" its persistent cookies (though you can nuke Flash cookies with cron [slashdot.org]).
As to the HTML5 pieces ... it's typical that an add-on implements something before Mozilla proper. This serves as a proof-of-concept and side-steps the pains of the Mozilla Foundation's development cycle. It also serves as a way to prove desirability. There's nothing preventing this from getting pushed into the Mozilla core later on. I hope it does.
BetterPrivacy (Score:2, Interesting)
I've been using the extension "Better Privacy" to kill the so-called 'super cookie' since the beginning of August this summer, works great.
Note to mods- if you're going to accept a story about cookie killers, at least find one that lists more than one specific piece of software. These aren't the only two extensions out there either.
Your Browser Sucks! (Score:1, Interesting)
The real problem is that your browser sucks! A decent browser would not allow a website(remote attacker) to execute malicious code(all remote code is malicious) or write data in unauthorized places. The browser should completely jail whatever happens within it. I realize that it's all about features but, the problem with features is flaws like this.
If the browser allows writing of data even via Java to the local drive, it should be jailed and in turn eliminated by Private Browsing mode. It should also be wi
How to win the privacy war... (Score:1)