A Privacy Analysis of Google and Yandex Safe Browsing

Thomas Gerbet (1) , Amrit Kumar (2) , Cédric Lauradoux (2)

1 UGA [2016-2019] - Université Grenoble Alpes [2016-2019]
2 PRIVATICS - Privacy Models, Architectures and Tools for the Information Society

Google and Yandex Safe Browsing are popular services included in many webbrowsers to prevent users from visiting phishing or malware website links. If Safe Browsing servicesprotect their users from losing private information, they also require that their servers receivebrowsing information on the very same users. In this paper, we present an analysis of Googleand Yandex Safe Browsing services from a privacy perspective. We quantify the privacy providedby these services by analyzing the possibility of re-identifying a URL visited by a client. Wehence challenge Google’s privacy policies where they claim that Google can not recover URLsvisited by its users. Our analysis and experimental results show that Google and Yandex SafeBrowsing can potentially be used as a tool to track specific classes of individuals. Additionally, ourinvestigations on the data currently included in Yandex Safe Browsing provides a concrete set ofURLs/domains that can be re-identified without much effort

Mots clés: Google Safe browsing; Privacy; privacy-set size

Domaines: Cryptographie et sécurité [cs.CR]

Thomas Gerbet, Amrit Kumar, Cédric Lauradoux. A Privacy Analysis of Google and Yandex Safe Browsing. 46th IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks - DSN 2016, Jun 2016, Toulouse, France. ⟨10.1109/DSN.2016.39⟩. ⟨hal-01399829⟩