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Security researchers in Austria this week disclosed a new no‑interaction web attack called FROST (fingerprinting remotely using OPFS‑based SSD timing) that can let a malicious webpage infer which other sites and applications a visitor has open.
The technique abuses the browser feature Origin Private File System (OPFS) to create a very large file on a visitor’s solid‑state drive and then measures tiny SSD I/O latency variations caused by other activity.
Traces are fed to a pretrained convolutional neural network to classify open websites and running apps.
In lab tests the team reported about 88.9% accuracy for website identification and roughly 95.8% for detecting applications on an Apple M2 Mac; the SSD timing primitive also worked on Linux though the full attack was not executed there, and Windows was not tested.
FROST runs entirely in the browser and can profile activity across different browsers on the same machine.
Researchers say the attack is detectable (it requires multi‑gigabyte OPFS files) and only works while the malicious tab remains open.
The paper is scheduled for presentation at DIMVA in July 2026 and browser vendors have been notified; there are no confirmed in‑the‑wild incidents.
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Monday, June 1, 2026 10:07 UTC
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Thursday, May 28, 2026 20:26 UTC
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