They’re ba-ack: Browser-sniffing ghosts return to haunt Chrome, IE, Firefox (Ars Technica)

Ars Technica looks at a revival of a technique for remote sites to determine browser history. Originally, using JavaScript and CSS allowed sites to track browsing history, but those holes were eventually closed by browser makers. Exploiting a timing attack [PDF] on the browser can distinguish between sites that have been visited and those that have not. "The browser timing attack technique [Aäron] Thijs borrowed from fellow researcher [Paul] Stone abuses a programming interface known as requestAnimationFrame, which is designed to make animations smoother. It can be used to time the browser's rendering, which is the time it takes for the browser to display a given webpage. By measuring variations in the time it takes links to be displayed, attackers can infer if a particular website has been visited."

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