Tongwei Ren (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Alexander Wittmany (University of Kansas), Lorenzo De Carli (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Drew Davidsony (University of Kansas)

DNS CNAME redirections, which can “steer” browser requests towards a domain different than the one in the request’s URI, are a simple and oftentimes effective means to obscure the source of a web object behind an alias. These redirections can be used to make third-party content appear as first-party content. The practice of evading browser security mechanisms through misuse of CNAMEs, referred to as CNAME cloaking, has been recently growing in popularity among advertisers/trackers to bypass blocklists and privacy policies.

While CNAME cloaking has been reported in past measurement studies, its impact on browser cookie policies has not been analyzed. We close this gap by presenting an in-depth characterization of how CNAME redirections affect cookie propagation. Our analysis uses two distinct data collection samples (June and December 2020). Beyond confirming that CNAME cloaking continues to be popular, our analysis identifies a number of websites transmitting sensitive cookies to cloaked third-parties, thus breaking browser cookie policies. Manual review of such cases identifies exfiltration of authentication cookies to advertising/tracking domains, which raises serious security concerns.

View More Papers

EMMasker: EM Obfuscation Against Website Fingerprinting

Mohammed Aldeen, Sisheng Liang, Zhenkai Zhang, Linke Guo (Clemson University), Zheng Song (University of Michigan – Dearborn), and Long Cheng (Clemson University)

Read More

DeFiIntel: A Dataset Bridging On-Chain and Off-Chain Data for...

Iori Suzuki (Graduate School of Environment and Information Sciences, Yokohama National University), Yin Minn Pa Pa (Institute of Advanced Sciences, Yokohama National University), Nguyen Thi Van Anh (Institute of Advanced Sciences, Yokohama National University), Katsunari Yoshioka (Graduate School of Environment and Information Sciences, Yokohama National University)

Read More

Dinosaur Resurrection: PowerPC Binary Patching for Base Station Analysis

Uwe Muller, Eicke Hauck, Timm Welz, Jiska Classen, Matthias Hollick (Secure Mobile Networking Lab, TU Darmstadt)

Read More