If you rely on the private browsing mode built into your web browser to hide your internet history, you might want to reconsider.
These modes will still leave a trace of your secretive web history, researchers from MIT have warned.
Most modern browsers boast this feature, including Private Browsing in Mozilla Firefox, InPrivate in Microsoft Edge, Incognito Mode in Google Chrome, and Private Window in Safari.
However, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have warned users their browsing history will often still remain on the machine, in RAM or temporary storage.
According to the researchers, each time you visit a webpage – even anonymously – the data from the site is loaded into memory, displayed and cached.
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Your machine may also have to access or modify libraries and plugins when loading a webpage, which also leaves behind a trace.
The web browser may attempt to erase these traces after you’ve finished browsing, but its success can vary wildly.
MIT researchers have demonstrated that a ghost version of your web activity can be left behind in the RAM of your machine, even if it’s just a hash of some data or timestamp.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Graduate Student Frank Wang, who is the lead author of the paper, said: “The fundamental problem is that [the browser] collects this information, and then the browser does its best effort to fix it.
“But at the end of the day, no matter what the browser’s best effort is, it still collects it.”
The MIT researchers have unveiled an alternative technology, dubbed Veil, which they claims solves all of the failings with current systems.
Veil handles delivery of a website via a so-called “blinding server.”
So, when you enter a URL into the address bar, the relevant webpage is retrieved for you from special servers, which encrypt in transit and in your browser cache.
The data is only decrypted when you view it.
Using this system, your computer never actually registers the actual URL and never caches any of data from the webpage.
Veil also injects invisible garbage code into the page so that any ghost traces left on your machine do not match-up with any database.
Converting webpages to Veil-compatible ones is handled by a special compiler, which has been provided by the MIT researchers.
Swapping your website over shouldn’t break anything, however, the process will add to the bandwidth used and requests served, owing to the code mutations and additional crypto operations being handled behind-the-scenes.
This is not the first time users have been cautioned about the safety of private browsing windows.
DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg has warned about these systems in the past.