Safari and iOS users: Your browsing activity is being leaked in real time

'For the past four months, Apple’s iOS and iPadOS devices and Safari browser have violated one of the Internet’s most sacrosanct security policies. The violation results from a bug that leaks user identities and browsing activity in real time. The same-origin policy is a foundational security mechanism that forbids documents, scripts, or other content loaded from one origin—meaning the protocol, domain name, and port of a given webpage or app—from interacting with resources from other origins. Without this policy, malicious sites—say, badguy.example.com—could access login credentials for Google or another trusted site when it’s open in a different browser window or tab. Since September’s release of Safari 15 and iOS and iPadOS 15, this policy has been broken wide open, research published late last week found. As a demo site graphically reveals, it’s trivial for one site to learn the domains of sites open in other tabs or windows, as well as user IDs and other identifying information associated with the other sites.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/01/safari-and-ios-bug-re... Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

On Wed, 19 Jan 2022 08:35:57 +1300, Peter Reutemann wrote:
'For the past four months, Apple’s iOS and iPadOS devices and Safari browser have violated one of the Internet’s most sacrosanct security policies. The violation results from a bug that leaks user identities and browsing activity in real time.'
As others have pointed out, this kind of laxness is what happens when you don’t have competition to keep you on your toes. Because Apple doesn’t allow browser apps to use anything other than the built-in Safari engine on its mobile platforms, there is effectively zero competition in this area, notwithstanding the seeming appearance of a choice of third-party browsers.
participants (2)
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro
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Peter Reutemann