Collected research

Browser history re:visited

Michael Smith, Craig Disselkoen, Shravan Narayan, Fraser Brown and Deian Stefan · usenix.org

Four new history sniffing attacks, two on visited links and two on caches, abuse modern browser features such as the CSS Paint API and the JavaScript bytecode cache, which handle cross-origin URL data without accounting for privacy. They let a page learn which sites a visitor has been to, one of them at roughly 3,000 URLs per second, against every browser tested but Tor Browser.

Record

Researcher

Michael Smith, Craig Disselkoen, Shravan Narayan, Fraser Brown and Deian Stefan

Published by

usenix.org

Topic

Browser

In the archive

• Collected in the 2018 research round

Related sources

• Browser history re:visited [talk @ USENIX WOOT 2018]

Tags

• xsleak
• info-leak
• side-channel
• css
• javascript
• cache
• timing-attack
• cve

This page is the archive's own catalogue record. The research is the work of Michael Smith, Craig Disselkoen, Shravan Narayan, Fraser Brown and Deian Stefan, first published at the original source. Preserved copies are kept so the citation survives its host; this one was last captured on 19 August 2026.