How they catch you! New, Undeletable, Web Cookie

johndea

Regular Member

Jun 23, 2011

308

35

• Aug 16, 2011

• #1

How they catch YOU!


http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/08/new_undeletable.html


New, Undeletable, Web Cookie

A couple of weeks ago Wired reported the discovery of a new, undeletable, web cookie:

Researchers at U.C. Berkeley have discovered that some of the net?s most popular sites are using a tracking service that can?t be evaded -- even when users block cookies, turn off storage in Flash, or use browsers? ?incognito? functions.​

The Wired article was very short on specifics, so I waited until one of the researchers -- Ashkan Soltani -- wrote up more details. He finally did, in a quite technical essay:

What differentiates KISSmetrics apart from Hulu with regards to respawning is, in addition to Flash and HTML5 LocalStorage, KISSmetrics was exploiting the browser cache to store persistent identifiers via stored Javascript and ETags. ETags are tokens presented by a user?s browser to a remote webserver in order to determine whether a given resource (such as an image) has changed since the last time it was fetched. Rather than simply using it for version control, we found KISSmetrics returning ETag values that reliably matched the unique values in their 'km_ai' user cookies.​

 

N

nandos

Junior Member

Aug 5, 2010

144

19

• Aug 16, 2011

• #2

That shit should be illegal!

 

J

jbrewski

Junior Member

May 12, 2011

116

32

• Aug 16, 2011

• #3

^^ like nandos said
hmmmmmm, this is not good

 

F

-FPC-

Regular Member

Apr 1, 2011

341

68

• Aug 16, 2011

• #4

From what I can tell wouldn't noscript help fight this?

 

TermsB

Senior Member

May 19, 2009

1,078

741

• Aug 16, 2011

• #5

If you notice this kind of cookie would still be cleared by CCleaner. It's still a temp file.

 

N

nandos

Junior Member

Aug 5, 2010

144

19

• Aug 16, 2011

• #6

But if it's these so called big sites that do it, you'll probably end up on it again and have the cookie placed once more. It'll be a cycle.

TermsB said:

If you notice this kind of cookie would still be cleared by CCleaner. It's still a temp file.

Click to expand...

 

F

funeralopolis

Newbie

Aug 7, 2011

16

8

• Aug 16, 2011

• #7

Someone will write a program/add on that deletes it after a while.

 

timothywcrane

Supreme Member

Apr 25, 2009

1,339

742

• Aug 16, 2011

• #8

I know that everyone sees this as a bad thing, but at the same time, complain about one day cookies on Amazon. I see this as a good thing, If you know how to delete it. I can't wait for it to catch on in the IM industry, the one time, lasts forever Aff cookie. Then my only job would be to contract builders for custom browser loading. Geolocated for high profit (as I am US based), and forever ever lasting. F Google.

 

Nookie Monster

Senior Member

Mar 28, 2010

967

466

• Aug 16, 2011

• #9

timothywcrane said:

I know that everyone sees this as a bad thing, but at the same time, complain about one day cookies on Amazon. I see this as a good thing, If you know how to delete it. I can't wait for it to catch on in the IM industry, the one time, lasts forever Aff cookie. Then my only job would be to contract builders for custom browser loading. Geolocated for high profit (as I am US based), and forever ever lasting. F Google.

Click to expand...

You my friend are a visionary after my own heart. I can see the enormous possibilities of this.

Damn...... I wish I could write code.