Safe Browsing Services: to Track, Censor and Protect
Résumé
Users often inadvertently
click malicious phishing or malware
website links, and in doing so they sacrifice secret information and
sometimes even fully compromise their devices.
The purveyors of these sites are highly motivated and
hence construct intelligently scripted URLs to remain inconspicuous over
the Internet. In light of the ever increasing number of such
URLs, new ingenious
strategies have been invented to detect them and inform
the end user when he is tempted to access such a link.
At the forefront lies the
\textit{Safe Browsing} technique, which queries a blacklist to
identify unsafe websites and notify users and webmasters
allowing them to protect themselves from harm.
In this paper, we show how Safe Browsing services work and how they damage
the privacy of their users. We study the privacy of high impact Safe
Browsing services including Google/ and Yandex to understand how much
information they can collect. We hereby warn their users that these
services can be easily used for surveillance to track specific classes of
individuals or to censor certain websites. Google and Yandex are currently not
accountable for the entries included in their blacklist.
Until a major advance in the field of private information retrieval, Safe Browsing can not be made private and the current services can not be trusted. We provide evidences that \yandex/ has all probes in place to track the users of targeted websites.
Origine | Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s) |
---|