Retracted: Implications on Privacy and Forensics on Current Browsers

Abstract

To date, the evolution of Web-related technologies has been mainly driven by the user’s quest for ever faster and more intuitive World Wide Web (WWW). One of the most recent stages of this evolution is built around the idea that the user experience can be further improved by enabling the browser to predict and preload Web resources the user is most likely to seek. While this concept of ‘pre-browsing’ is beneficial from the point of view of speed and performance, little thought has been put into understanding and analyzing its potential implications on ‘other’ metrics – including user reputation and privacy. In this paper, we first provide a comprehensive overview of the main pre-browsing mechanisms as implemented in/by today’s browsers. Subsequently, we outline a few hypothetical (yet very real) scenarios in which these mechanisms end up turning the browser into a dangerous tool that acts against its very own user. The ultimate goal of our work is to make the wider Internet community critically rethink the way pre-browsing mechanisms are implemented and used in today’s WWW. CCS Concepts: Information systems ➝ World Wide Web ➝ Social recommendation. • Security and privacy ➝ Systems security ➝ Browser security. • Applied computing ➝ Computer forensics ➝ Evidence collection, storage and analysis.   Retraction Notice: This paper has been retracted from the journal after receipt of written complains. This journal is determined to promote integrity in research publication. This retraction is in spirit of the same. After formal procedures editor(s) and publisher have retracted this paper on 19th May-2017. Related policy is available here: http://goo.gl/lI77Nn