Sniffly To Sniffing Browser History Using HSTS And CSP

Sniffly Trick For Browser Fingerprinting. Sniffing browser history using HSTS + CSP.

Sniffly is an attack that abuses HTTP Strict Transport Security and Content Security Policy to allow arbitrary websites to sniff a user's browsing history. It has been tested in Firefox and Chrome.

How it works

I recommend reading the inline comments in src/index.js to understand how Sniffly does a timing attack in both FF and Chrome without polluting the local HSTS store. tl;dr version:

1. User visits Sniffly page
2. Browser attempts to load images from various HSTS domains over HTTP
3. Sniffly sets a CSP policy that restricts images to HTTP, so image sources are blocked before they are redirected to HTTPS. This is crucial! If the browser completes a request to the HTTPS site, then it will receive the HSTS pin, and the attack will no longer work when the user visits Sniffly.
4. When an image gets blocked by CSP, its onerror handler is called. In this case, the onerror handler does some fancy tricks to time how long it took for the image to be redirected from HTTP to HTTPS. If this time is on the order of a millisecond, it was an HSTS redirect (no network request was made), which means the user has visited the image's domain before. If it's on the order of 100 milliseconds, then a network request probably occurred, meaning that the user hasn't visited the image's domain.

Finding HSTS hosts

To scrape an included list of sites (util/strict-transport-security.txt, courtesy Scott Helme) to determine which hosts send HSTS headers, do:

$ cd util
$ ./run.sh > results.log

where 1 batch is 100 sites. You can override util/strict-transport-security.txt with a different list, such as the full Alexa Top 1M, if you want.

To process and sort the results by max-age, excluding ones with max-age less than 1 day and ones that are preloaded:

$ cd util
$ ./process.py > processed.log

Once that's done, you can copy the hosts from processed.log into src/index.js.

Running sploitz

Visiting file:///path/to/sniffly/src/index.html in Chrome should just work. In Firefox, CSP headers using the tag are apparently not supported yet, so you need to set up a local webserver to serve the CSP HTTP response header. My Nginx server block looks something like this:

server {
    listen 8081;
    server_name localhost;
    location / {
        root /path/to/sniffly/src;
        add_header Content-Security-Policy "img-src http://*";
        index index.html;
    }
}

Caveats

Not supported yet in Safari, IE, or Chrome on iOS.
Extensions such as HTTPS Everywhere will mess up results.
Doesn't work reliably in Tor Browser since timings are rounded to the nearest 100-millisecond.
Users with a different HSTS preload list (ex: due to having an older browser) may not see accurate results.

More info available in my ToorCon 2015 slides: https://zyan.scripts.mit.edu/presentations/toorcon2015.pdf.

Demo

Visit http://zyan.scripts.mit.edu/sniffly/ in Firefox/Chrome/Opera with HTTPS Everywhere disabled. If you use an ad blocker, a bunch of advertising domains will probably show up in the "Probably Visited" column (ignore them).

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