COOKIEGUARD: Characterizing and Isolating the First-Party Cookie Jar

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2406.05310v1
• Date: Sat, 8 Jun 2024 01:02:49 GMT
• Title: COOKIEGUARD: Characterizing and Isolating the First-Party Cookie Jar
• Authors: Pouneh Nikkhah Bahrami, Aurore Fass, Zubair Shafiq,
• Abstract summary: Third-party scripts write (or textitghost-write) first-party cookies in the browser's cookie jar because they are included in the website's main frame. Third-party scripts are able to access all first-party cookies, both the actual first-party cookies as well as the ghost-written first-party cookies by different third-party scripts. We propose name to introduce isolation between first-party cookies set by different third-party scripts in the main frame.
• Score: 14.314375420700504
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: As third-party cookies are going away, first-party cookies are increasingly being used for tracking. Prior research has shown that third-party scripts write (or \textit{ghost-write}) first-party cookies in the browser's cookie jar because they are included in the website's main frame. What is more is that a third-party script is able to access all first-party cookies, both the actual first-party cookies as well as the ghost-written first-party cookies by different third-party scripts. Existing isolation mechanisms in the web browser such as SOP and CSP are not designed to address this lack of isolation between first-party cookies written by different third-parties. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of cross-domain first-party cookie retrieval, exfiltration, and modification on top-10K websites. Most notably, we find 18\% and 4\% of the first-party cookies are exfiltrated and overwritten, respectively, by cross-domain third-party scripts. We propose \name to introduce isolation between first-party cookies set by different third-party scripts in the main frame. To this end, \name intercepts cookie get and set operations between third-party scripts and the browser's cookie jar to enforce strict isolation between first-party cookies set by different third-party domains. Our evaluation of \name shows that it effectively blocks all cross-domain cookie read/write operations to provide a fully isolated cookie jar. While it generally does not impact appearance, navigation, or other website functionality, the strict isolation policy disrupts Single Sign-On (SSO) on just 11\% of websites that rely on first-party cookies for session management. Our work demonstrates the feasibility of isolating first-party cookies.

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