On Wed, 3 Aug 2011, Amos Jeffries wrote:

On Tue, 2 Aug 2011 13:39:51 -0700 (PDT), John Hardin wrote:

 The analysis of the APT techniques used by Kissmetrics (at
 http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/07/undeletable-cookie/) is
 interesting if thin, and suggests one way that Squid might be
 leveraged to interfere with such tracking: deleting the "Etag:" header
 from request replies.

/me bows head in shame

 Comments?

All they are doing is a server-side browsing session. But unlike Cookies, ETag are usually shared between many clients simultaneously. Middleware like Squid is able to reply to them instead of contacting the origin site. Even creates new ones the origin is not aware of when compressing on the fly.

Some more details are available in the more-academic paper:

  http://ashkansoltani.org/docs/respawn_redux.html

One example in that paper:

    INITIAL REQUEST HEADER:
      GET /i.js HTTP/1.1
      Host: i.kissmetrics.com

    INITIAL RESPONSE HEADER:
      Etag: "Z9iGGN1n1-zeVqbgzrlKkl39hiY"
      Expires: Sun, 12 Dec 2038 01:19:31 GMT
      Last-Modified: Wed, 27 Jul 2011 00:19:31 GMT
      Set-Cookie: _km_cid=Z9iGGN1n1-zeVqbgzrlKkl39hiY;
                  expires=Sun, 12 Dec 2038 01:19:31  GMT;path=/;

...has the possibly useful signature of the Etag value appearing in a cookie being set. Any comments on the utility of writing an eCAP filter to block _that_ (to either strip the cookie or block the entire response)?

"Give up" isn't helpful. :)

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 John Hardin KA7OHZ                    http://www.impsec.org/~jhardin/
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