https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/01/26/supercookie-pro...
> I also think that it would have been appropriate to notify about the ulterior motive behind this defect report at the latest when the paper got published. This underhanded approach of reporting a defect just leaves a bad taste, really. The behavior may be an actual defect in the classical sense, but I'm just wondering what would have happened, had this been addressed "in time" by the developers. It would seem that the researchers would then have triumphantly proclaimed that all major browsers are prone to their newly found attack. Must be somewhat disappointing that it didn't get fixed "in time" to make it into the paper that way
How scammy can research get?
They say that they filed this bug before they had devised their attack on the favicon cache; and so they reasonably asked, “why isn’t Firefox caching it like everyone else and as we believe everyone should?”—because as :mossop explains in comment 13, the spec suggests it should be cached, by remaining silent on the point.
Then, they developed the attack, and reported it to the affected browsers, which excluded Firefox. Certainly it was not great to leave it open without adding a comment saying “hey, don’t go ahead with fixing this yet, we developed a fingerprinting attack if it does get cached”, but it’s easy to understand this being overlooked. Also, as the reporters of the issue, they would receive any progress on the issue by email, so if you assume good faith, then they would have pumped the brakes if someone had actually gone ahead with implementing the initially-requested caching.
It’s possible that there was bad faith, but I find the good faith explanation entirely plausible—that there was a minor error of judgement only.
[1] https://www.cs.uic.edu/~polakis/papers/solomos-ndss21.pdf
Due to your feedback I've updated the table in the GitRepo and the website and added that the current FF version (v 85.0) is no longer vulnerable! ~jonas
Running privacy badger and ublock origin