Browser Cache Research Articles

A Browser Fingerprint Authentication Scheme Based on the Browser Cache Side-Channel Technology

A Browser Fingerprint Authentication Scheme Based on the Browser Cache Side-Channel Technology

Optimize Build Time of Microservice Based Applicationusing Containerization and Browser Caching

Optimize Build Time of Microservice Based Applicationusing Containerization and Browser Caching

Performance Testing and Optimization of DiTenun Website

DiTenun website is a web-based application developed to create new motifs or new weaving patterns. This website needs to have good performance so that it can be optimally used by the users. By understanding the importance of the information available on the DiTenun website, a performance testing is necessary. This performance test aims to verify specific system performance such as response time and service availability despite receiving a large number of requests. The performance analysis of the DiTenun website was carried out by spike testing using the Apache JMeter tool. In solving the problems and improving the performance of the DiTenun website, the researcher applied website optimization by utilizing the browser cache, activating gzip compression, and eliminating rendering – blocking resources. Evaluation of each solution was carried out by using a hypothesis test, namely using a paired sample t test. The result of the test showed that each solution that was implemented can be used to improve performance in the form of load time of the DiTenun website.

SERVICE WORKERS (SW): FACILITATING OFFLINE ACCESSIBILITY IN WEB APPLICATIONS

Consistent access to web application contents is of paramount importance to its end users. Irrespective of a user’s location and the internet condition, there is the desire to interact with web applications, particularly through the use of mobile devices. Attempts have been made by previous researchers to introduce the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) caching otherwise known as the browser cache which is automatically enabled by the browser and the Application Cache (AppCache) as an attempt to foster offline accessibility. While these approaches have helped, there still exists the problem of poor memory management and content validity. A systematic Literature Review (SLR) was done on existing techniques, after which an overview of Service Workers (SW) and the identification of various SW caching strategies were proposed. Any of the proposed SW strategies can be adopted by web application developers based on the network condition and the contents of the application as this will help in reducing the loading time of the application, promote efficient mobile memory management, and increase the number of active users

Streamed Video Reconstruction for Firefox Browser Forensics

In criminal investigations, the digital evidence extracted from social media may provide exceptional support. Reviewing the history or cache of the web browser may provide a valuable insight into the activity of the suspect. The growing popularity of Internet video streaming creates a risk of this technology misuse. There are a few published research on video reconstruction forensics on the Chrome browser. There is a difference in the methods applied to reconstruct cached video on Chrome from the methods applied to Firefox or any browser. Our primary focus in this research is to examine the forensic procedures required to reconstruct cached video stream data using Twitter and YouTube on the Firefox browser. Some work has been done to reconstruct a cached video on the Chrome browser, but we need more work on the rest of the browsers, most notably the Firefox browser used in this research. Both examination strategies and contemplations displayed are approved and suitable for the forensic study of various streaming platforms as well as the web browser caches.

QUALITY ANALYSIS OF PAYROLL INFORMATION SYSTEM BASED ON ISO 9126 IN PT KARYA PRIMA USAHATAMA

PT Karya Prima Usahatama is a company that engaged in Cleaning Service, Gardener Service and Office supporting facilities, the main activities of PT Karya Prima Usahatama are very closely related to human resource management and in 2016 PT Karya Prima Usahatama took the initiative to built Payroll Information System that serves to facilitate its operational activities. The purpose of this study is to analyze the quality of Payroll Information System at PT Karya Prima Usahatama based on ISO 9126 which consist of six quality aspect such as functionality, reliability, usability, efficiency, Portability and maintainability. This Analysis carried out by the method of observation, interview, questionnaire and assisted with software such as SPSS, WAPT 10.0, GTMetrix and Web Browser. The Result for Payroll Information System Analysis with Six Quality aspect from ISO 9126 are still have deficiency in the aspect of Efficiency, in the other words the software still has deficiency in providing the appropriate performance. There are five priority issues from the test result using GTMetrix for efficiency aspect such as Leverage Browser Caching, Inline Small CSS, Avoid Bad Request, Minify JavaScript and Optimize Image.

Déjà vu: Abusing Browser Cache Headers to Identify and Track Online Users

Abstract Many browser cache attacks have been proposed in the literature to sniff the user’s browsing history. All of them rely on specific time measurements to infer if a resource is in the cache or not. Unlike the state-of-the-art, this paper reports on a novel cache-based attack that is not a timing attack but that abuses the HTTP cache-control and expires headers to extract the exact date and time when a resource was cached by the browser. The privacy implications are serious as this information can not only be utilized to detect if a website was visited by the user but it can also help build a timeline of the user’s visits. This goes beyond traditional history sniffing attacks as we can observe patterns of visit and model user’s behavior on the web. To evaluate the impact of our attack, we tested it on all major browsers and found that all of them, except the ones based on WebKit, are vulnerable to it. Since our attack requires specific HTTP headers to be present, we also crawled the Tranco Top 100K websites and identified 12, 970 of them can be detected with our approach. Among them, 1, 910 deliver resources that have expiry dates greater than 100 days, enabling long-term user tracking. Finally, we discuss possible defenses at both the browser and standard levels to prevent users from being tracked.

Content Matters: Clustering Web Pages for QoE Analysis With WebCLUST

The properties of a web page have a strong impact on its overall loading process, including the download of its contents and their progressive rendering at the browser. As a consequence, web page content has a strong impact on the experience of web users. In this paper, we present WebCLUST, a clustering-based classification approach for web pages, which groups pages into quality-meaningful content classes impacting the Quality of Experience (QoE) of the users. Groups are defined based on standard Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) content breakdown and external subdomain connections, obtained through in-browser, application level measurements. Using a large corpus of multi-device, heterogeneous web content and QoE-relevant measurements for the top-500 most popular websites in the Internet, we show how WebCLUST can automatically identify relevant web content classes showing significantly different performance in terms of Web QoE relevant metrics, such as Speed Index. We additionally evaluate the impact of content caching and device type on the identification performance of WebCLUST, showing how content classes might look significantly different, depending on the access device type (desktop vs mobile), as well as when considering browser caching. Our findings suggest that Web QoE assessment should explicitly consider page content and subdomain embedding within the analysis, especially when it comes to recent work on Web QoE inference through machine learning models. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study showing the impact of web content on Web QoE metrics, opening the door to new Web QoE assessment strategies.

What’s in the Cloud? - An examination of the impact of cloud storage usage on the browser cache

What’s in the Cloud? - An examination of the impact of cloud storage usage on the browser cache

WebAssembly as an alternative solution for JavaScript in developing modern web applications

The article describes the impact of using WebAssembly on the performance of web applications. A Blazor framework based on WebAssembly was used. The paper shows that it is possible to create fully functioning Single Page Application using C# programming language. The second application was made using Angular framework. Both applications implement the same functionalities. For prepared applications loading time and size of transferred data was measured. The impact of using browser cache memory and gzip compression was examined. The performance of handling http requests using GET and POST methods were measured. The performance of WebAssembly against JavaScript code in task of sorting a list of N objects was compared. The performance of modifying html DOM was examined. Selected code metrics of written applications were compared. JavaScript presents better performance with tasks related with browser API. WebAssembly was better for computing.

Enhanced Methods of Mobile Cache Sharing and Pre-fetching for Required Web Contents

Availability of content over the web is increasing exponentially. The demand for content by users is also increasing rapidly. The problem of making the right content available to user at the right time will continue to be a crucial issue. As variety of contents are available and variety of users are involved, there is no single way of matching the availability versus need and deliver content instantly especially in a limited mobile environment. Hence a hybrid method is proposed in this paper by combining the different techniques such as caching, pre-fetching and cache sharing with noise reduction to improve the overall performance of mobile for optimal cache memory utilisation, efficient bandwidth utilization, network traffic reduction and latency reduction. Efficiency of mobile caching and pre-fetching is improved using Enhanced Bloom Filter technique and data is shared among cooperative users by establishing a voluntary hub. The unwanted contents in the web page can be considered as noise which is removed when storing the web pages in cache or pre-fetch area. The success of the proposed method greatly depends on the hit ratio of contents rendered locally rather than getting it from server. In order to reduce server hits, sharing the contents of cache and pre-fetch area amongst mobile users is effective. Whenever any user requires new content, even if it is not available in browser cache or local cache of that user, the content can be rendered from the cache or pre-fetch area of collaborative mobile users rather than hitting the server. This hybrid cooperative cache sharing and pre-fetching for accessing the required contents improve the overall performance and hit ratio than the existing methods.

Page Load Time Speed Increase on Disease Outbreak Investigation Information System Website

Outbreaks or extraordinary events often become an issue that occurs in Indonesia. Therefore, an outbreak investigation information system is required to collect, manage and analyze data quickly and accurately. On the other hand, challenges in data accessing processes in certain locations are still constrained by a slow internet connection. This paper conducted speed increase of a page load or site speed time from disease outbreaks investigation information system website.Page load time speed testing was carried out using Google Chrome Developer Tools and using simulation speeds of 2.5 Mbps. Testing time was carried out by dividing the time into three sections, morning hours, working hours and night hours. Implementation of page load time increase includes reducing HTTP requests, utilizing GZIP compression, performing code minification, setting browser chache, using CDN, and using other enhancement techniques.The results showed that after implementing an increase in page load time by turning off cache and using cache, there was an increase in site speed. When the browser cache was turned off, an average page load time increased of 54.79% from the previous time. Whereas when using the browser cache, page load time speed increased by 55.28% from the previous time.

Reconstructing streamed video content: A case study on YouTube and Facebook Live stream content in the Chrome web browser cache

With the increased popularity of online video streaming comes the risk of this technology's subsequent abuse. With a number of cases noted in 2017 where individuals have engaged with illegal or policy breaching video content, digital forensics practitioners are often tasked with investigating the subsequent ‘fingerprint’ of such acts. This is often to determine both the content of a stream in question, and, how it has been interacted with, typically from an analysis of data residing on a suspect's local device. This article provides an examination of the forensic procedures required to identify and reconstruct cached video stream data using both YouTube and Facebook Live as example case studies. Stream reconstruction methodologies are offered where results show that where a YouTube and Facebook Live video have been played, buffered video stream data can be reassembled to produce a viewable video clip of content.

I didn't see that! An examination of internet browser cache behaviour following website visits

By default, all major web browsing applications cache visited website content to the local disk to improve browser efficiency and enhance user experience. As a result of this action, the cache provides a window of opportunity for the digital forensic practitioner to establish the nature of the content which was hosted on the websites which had been visited. Cache content is often evidential during cases surrounding Indecent Images of Children (IIoC) where it is often assumed that cached IIoC is a record of the content viewed by a defendant via their browser. However, this may not always be the case. This article investigates web browser cache behaviour in an attempt to identify whether it is possible to definitively establish what quantity of cached content was viewable by a user following a visit to a website. Both the Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome browser caches are analysed following visits to 10 test websites in order to quantify cache behaviour. Results indicate that the volume of locally cached content differs between both web browsers and websites visited, with instances of images cached which would not have been viewable by the user upon landing on a website. Further, the number of cached images appears to be effected by how much of a website a user scrolls through.

On Inferring Browsing Activity on Smartphones via USB Power Analysis Side-Channel

In this paper, we show that public USB charging stations pose a significant privacy risk to smartphone users even when no data communication is possible between the station and the user’s mobile device. We present a side-channel attack that allows a charging station to identify which Webpages are loaded while the smartphone is charging. To evaluate this side-channel, we collected power traces of Alexa top 50 Websites on multiple smartphones under several conditions, including battery charging level, browser cache enabled/disabled, taps on the screen, Wi-Fi/LTE, TLS encryption enabled/disabled, time elapsed between collection of training and testing data, and location of the Website. The results of our evaluation show that the attack is highly successful: in many settings, we were able to achieve over 90% Webpage identification accuracy. On the other hand, our experiments also show that this side-channel is sensitive to some of the aforementioned conditions. For instance, when training and testing traces were collected 70 days apart, accuracies were as low as 2.2%. Although there are studies that show that power-based side-channels can predict browsing activity on laptops, this paper is unique, because it is the first to study this side-channel on smartphones, under smartphone-specific constraints. Further, we demonstrate that Websites can be correctly identified within a short time span of $2\times6$ seconds, which is in contrast with prior work, which uses 15-s traces. This is important, because users typically spend less than 15 s on a Webpage.

SpecPad: device-independent NMR data visualization and processing based on the novel DART programming language and Html5 Web technology.

SpecPad is a new device-independent software program for the visualization and processing of one-dimensional and two-dimensional nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) time domain (FID) and frequency domain (spectrum) data. It is the result of a project to investigate whether the novel programming language DART, in combination with Html5 Web technology, forms a suitable base to write an NMR data evaluation software which runs on modern computing devices such as Android, iOS, and Windows tablets as well as on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X desktop PCs and notebooks. Another topic of interest is whether this technique also effectively supports the required sophisticated graphical and computational algorithms. SpecPad is device-independent because DART's compiled executable code is JavaScript and can, therefore, be run by the browsers of PCs and tablets. Because of Html5 browser cache technology, SpecPad may be operated off-line. Network access is only required during data import or export, e.g. via a Cloud service, or for software updates. A professional and easy to use graphical user interface consistent across all hardware platforms supports touch screen features on mobile devices for zooming and panning and for NMR-related interactive operations such as phasing, integration, peak picking, or atom assignment. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

BrowStEx: A tool to aggregate browser storage artifacts for forensic analysis

Web storage or browser storage, a new client-side data storage feature, was recommended as a part of the HTML5 specifications and now widely adopted by major web browser vendors. Web storage with native browser support has changed the paradigm of web application development unprecedentedly because persistent data storage with increased data size can be realized on the client. Web storage is poised to quickly become an area of particular interest for forensic investigators due to the potential to discover critical information from web browser artifacts at client side. However, the literature work on web browser forensics has traditionally focused on browsing history, browser cache, and cookie files (Oh et al., 2011). Therefore, we first discuss the prevalence of web storage implementation in widely used websites. Then, we compare and contrast the web storage technology currently implemented in the five major web browsers, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Apple's Safari. Moreover, in order to provide more insights into web storage and enable unified forensic analysis, a proof-of-concept tool, named as BrowStEx (Browser Storage Extractor), is described with implementation details. The commonalities, differences, and the proof-of-concept tool discussed in this paper can be useful in developing advanced forensic tools that can extract browser storage artifacts.

Man-in-the-browser-cache: Persisting HTTPS attacks via browser cache poisoning

In this paper, we present a systematic study of browser cache poisoning (BCP) attacks, wherein a network attacker performs a one-time Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attack on a user's HTTPS session, and substitutes cached resources with malicious ones. We investigate the feasibility of such attacks on five mainstream desktop browsers and 16 popular mobile browsers. We find that browsers are highly inconsistent in their caching policies for loading resources over SSL connections with invalid certificates. In particular, the majority of desktop browsers (99% of the market share) and popular mobile browsers (over a billion user downloads) are affected by BCP attacks to a large extent. Existing solutions for safeguarding HTTPS sessions fail to provide comprehensive defense against this threat. We provide guidelines for users and browser vendors to defeat BCP attacks. Meanwhile, we propose defense techniques for website developers to mitigate an important subset of BCP attacks on existing browsers without cooperation of users and browser vendors. We have reported our findings to browser vendors and confirmed the vulnerabilities. For example, Google has acknowledged the vulnerability we reported in Chrome's HTML5 AppCache and has fixed the problem according to our suggestion.

I Know Where You've Been: Geo-Inference Attacks via the Browser Cache

To provide more relevant content and better responsiveness, many websites customize their services according to users' geolocations. However, if geo-oriented websites leave location-sensitive content in the browser cache, other sites can sniff that content via side channels. The authors' case studies demonstrate the reliability and power of geo-inference attacks, which can measure the timing of browser cache queries and track a victim's country, city, and neighborhood. Existing defenses cannot effectively prevent such attacks, and additional support is required for a better defense deployment.

A Kind of Intelligent Client Flow Engine Based on Ajax

To solve the lack of intelligence and the traditional Ajax engine server’s overload problem, we design a new Ajax engine based on the browser caching mechanism named ICFE (Intelligent Client Flow Engine) which separates the business logic layer from data access layer, and transfers business logic layer and the relevant data to the client catch to implement.