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by bonyt 3075 days ago
Here is an interesting dilemma: should HSTS persist in incognito mode?

If not, then this becomes bad advice, because all the attacker has to do to disable HTTPS is not redirect http sites to https ones (sslstrip).

If so, then the list of sites for which your browser attempts HTTPS connections without being told to is the list of sites you’ve accessed in the past. This information could become a supercookie allowing sites to identify and track you even in incognito mode.

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/02/02/anatomy-of-a-bro...

2 comments

This is possible! HSTS does apply to incognito to my knowledge

Here’s a project that uses this fact to look up browser history: https://github.com/diracdeltas/sniffly

At least it only works on chromium-based browsers. Firefox fixed the supercookie problem when opening up a private browsing session back in Firefox 34.0.5 after it was discovered.

Which then makes the HSTS preload list and HTTPS Everywhere extension all the more valuable to defend against active attacks.

Unless the website makes use of HSTS preload