Introduction - If you have any usage issues, please Google them yourself
We study the security and privacy of private browsing
modes recently added to all major browsers. We first propose
a clean definition of the goals of private browsing
and survey its implementation in different browsers. We
conduct a measurement study to determine how often it is
used and on what categories of sites. Our results suggest
that private browsing is used differently from how it is
marketed. We then describe an automated technique for
testing the security of private browsing modes and report
on a few weaknesses found in the Firefox browser. Finally,
we show that many popular browser extensions and
plugins undermine the security of private browsing. We
propose and experiment with a workable policy that lets
users safely run e