Researchers show SSD timing attack that tracks open sites

Security researchers have demonstrated a new method that allows a malicious website to infer what other websites and applications a user has open by monitoring subtle timing patterns in their computer's solid-state drive. The technique, called FROST, works entirely through a standard web browser without requiring any software installation or special permissions from the user.

FROST, which stands for Fingerprinting Remotely using OPFS-based SSD Timing, is a side-channel attack that exploits a modern browser feature known as the Origin Private File System. This feature allows websites to create and store files locally on a user's device. A malicious site can create a very large file within this private storage area and then perform continuous random reads from it. When other applications or browser tabs access the same SSD, they compete for drive access, creating tiny, measurable delays in the attacker's read operations.

By analyzing these timing patterns with a trained convolutional neural network, an attacker can identify specific websites or desktop applications active on the system. Researchers from Graz University of Technology in Austria, who developed and documented the...