UCognito: Private Browsing without Tears

While private browsing is a standard feature, its implementation has been inconsistent among the major browsers. More seriously, it often fails to provide the adequate or even the intended privacy protection. For example, as shown in prior research, browser extensions and add-ons often undermine the goals of private browsing. In this paper, we first present our systematic study of private browsing. We developed a technical approach to identify browser traces left behind by a private browsing session, and showed that Chrome and Firefox do not correctly clear some of these traces. We analyzed the source code of these browsers and discovered that the current implementation approach is to decide the behaviors of a browser based on the current browsing mode (i.e., private or public); but such decision points are scattered throughout the code base. This implementation approach is very problematic because developers are prone to make mistakes given the complexities of browser components (including extensions and add-ons). Based on this observation, we propose a new and general approach to implement private browsing. The main idea is to overlay the actual filesystem with a sandbox filesystem when the browser is in private browsing mode, so that no unintended leakage is allowed and no persistent modification is stored. This approach requires no change to browsers and the OS kernel because the layered sandbox filesystem is implemented by interposing system calls. We have implemented a prototype system called Ucognito on Linux. Our evaluations show that Ucognito, when applied to Chrome and Firefox, stops all known privacy leaks identified by prior work and our current study. More importantly, Ucognito incurs only negligible performance overhead: e.g., 0%-2.5% in benchmarks for standard JavaScript and webpage loading.