JavaScript Template Attacks

Michael Schwarz (Graz University of Technology), Florian Lackner (Graz University of Technology), Daniel Gruss (Graz University of Technology)

Today, more and more web browsers and extensions provide anonymity features to hide user details. Furthermore, we present two new side-channel attacks on browser engines to detect the instruction-set architecture and the used memory allocator. We found environment-dependent properties in Firefox, Chrome, Edge, and mobile Tor, allowing us to reveal the underlying operating system, CPU architecture, used privacy-enhancing plugins, as well as exact browser version.

Source: www.ndss-symposium.org