On the Privacy of Private Browsing - A Forensic Approach

Private browsing has been a popular privacy feature built into all mainstream browsers since 2005. However, despite its prevalent use, the security of this feature has received little attention from the research community. In this paper, we present an up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of private browsing across four most popular web browsers: IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. We report that all browsers under study suffer from a variety of vulnerabilities, many of which have not been reported or known before. Our work highlights the complexity of the subject and calls for more attention from the security community.