Browser Web Storage Vulnerability Investigation: HTML5 localStorage Object

Along with the introduction of HTML5 a new data storage technique, Web Storage, has been added to browsers. This technique stores larger amounts of data for an extended period of time on a client system. This technology does not (as of this writing) have a fully implemented interface to support end user control. The authors interest is modeling the use of Web Storage to store illicit data. The authors built a web application that would take a file, encrypt it, split it into multiple parts and distribute it to as many clients as possible. At a later time, the system could then watch for return visits and retrieve data parts as clients interact with a host website. The recidivism rate of clients returning to the host website and the number of copies of each distributed part needed to achieve a reliable recovery rate of the entire file are under study.