October 1, 2020
Window references allow cross-origin pages to get access to some of the attributes of other pages. These references become available when using or allowing iframe and window.open. The references provide (limited) information about the window as they still respect the same-origin policy.
One of the accessible attributes is window.length which provides the number of frames in the window. This attribute can provide valuable information about a page to an attacker.
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October 1, 2020
Detecting if a cross-site page triggered a navigation (or didn’t) can be useful to an attacker. For example, a website may trigger a navigation in a certain endpoint depending on the status of the user.
To detect if any kind of navigation occurred, an attacker can:
Use an iframe and count the number of times the onload event is triggered. Check the value of history.length, which is accessible through any window reference.
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October 1, 2020
Network Timing side-channels have been present on the web since its beginning 1 2. These attacks have had different levels of impact over time, gaining new attention when browsers started shipping high precision timers like performance.now().
To obtain timing measurements attackers must use a clock, either an implicit or explicit one. These clocks are usually interchangeable for the purposes of XS-Leaks and only vary in accuracy and availability. For simplicity, this article will assume use of the performance.
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October 1, 2020
Measuring the time of JavaScript execution in a browser can give attackers information on when certain events are triggered, and how long some operations take.
Timing the Event Loop
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JavaScript’s concurrency model is based on a single-threaded event loop which means it can only run one task at a time. If, for example, some time-consuming task blocks the event loop, the user can perceive a freeze on a page as a result of the UI thread being starved.
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October 1, 2020
Hybrid Timing Attacks allow attackers to measure the sum of a bunch of factors that influence the final timing measurement. These factors include:
Network delays Document parsing Retrieval and processing of subresources Code execution Some of the factors differ in value depending on the application. This means that Network Timing might be more significant in pages with more backend processing while Execution Timing can be more significant in applications processing and displaying data within the browser.
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