Front-End Performance: The Dark Side @ Fronteers Spring Conference 2016

facebook-timing-attack

Video of the talk “Front-End Performance: The Dark Side” by Mathias Bynens which he gave at Fronteers Spring Conference 2016 which I attended:

In security-sensitive situations, performance can actually be a bug rather than a feature. This presentation covers timing attacks on the web, and demonstrates how modern performance-related web APIs can sometimes have a negative security impact.

The slides themselves are also available:

The mentioned Facebook timing attack – by which you can get to know private data (such as age, gender, etc.) of a user – was discovered by Tom Van Goethem, a former student of mine. Feel free to read his academic paper “The Clock is Still Ticking: Timing Attacks in the Modern Web” covering the topic.

Published by Bramus!

Bramus is a frontend web developer from Belgium, working as a Chrome Developer Relations Engineer at Google. From the moment he discovered view-source at the age of 14 (way back in 1997), he fell in love with the web and has been tinkering with it ever since (more …)

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