New tool protects users' private data while they browse

Computer scientists funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and affiliated with the University of California San Diego and Brave Software person developed a instrumentality that volition summation protections for users' backstage information portion they browse the web.

The tool, named SugarCoat, targets scripts that harm users' privacy—for example, by tracking their browsing history astir the web—yet are indispensable for the websites that embed them to function. SugarCoat replaces these scripts with others that person the aforesaid properties, minus the privacy-harming features. SugarCoat is designed to beryllium integrated into existing privacy-focused browsers similar Brave, Firefox and Tor arsenic good arsenic browser extensions similar uBlock Origin. SugarCoat is unfastened root and is presently being integrated into the Brave browser.

"SugarCoat is simply a applicable strategy designed to code the lose-lose dilemma that privacy-focused tools look today: Block privacy-harming scripts but interruption websites that trust connected them, oregon support sites working, but springiness up connected privacy," said Deian Stefan of UC San Diego. "SugarCoat eliminates this trade-off by allowing the scripts to run, frankincense preserving compatibility, portion preventing the scripts from accessing user-private data."

The researchers described their enactment astatine the ACM Conference connected Computer and Communications Security.

"SugarCoat integrates with existing content-blocking tools, similar advertisement blockers, to empower users to browse the Web without giving up their privacy," said Michael Smith, who is starring the project.

Most existing content-blocking tools marque precise coarse-grained decisions. They either wholly artifact oregon wholly let a publication to run, based connected whether it appears connected a nationalist database of privacy-harming scripts. In practice, though, immoderate scripts are some privacy-harming and indispensable for websites to function, and astir tools inevitably take to marque an objection and let these scripts to run. Today, determination are much than 6,000 objection rules letting done these privacy-harming scripts.

Instead of blocking a publication wholly oregon allowing it to run, content-blocking tools tin regenerate root codification with an alternate privacy-preserving version. For example, alternatively of loading fashionable website analytics scripts which besides way users, content-blocking tools regenerate these scripts with fake versions that look the same. This ensures that the content-blocking tools are not breaking web pages that embed these scripts and that the scripts cannot entree backstage data—and frankincense study it backmost to analytics companies.

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More information: Michael Smith et al, SugarCoat: Programmatically Generating Privacy-Preserving, Web-Compatible Resource Replacements for Content Blocking, Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference connected Computer and Communications Security (2021). DOI: 10.1145/3460120.3484578