I was doing some googling in Firefox a bit ago, when something happened that has happened before. I hit "search", and I got a flood of cookies from the first entry on the search-list. Firefox was pre-caching the first hit in the eventuality I wanted to go there. Fine. Good.
Disclaimer: WWU doesn't operate a firewall or web-proxy servers. ResTek does, but that's a separate network. This is a theoretical exercise.
Then it hit me. That's activity that I don't control. That's activity that could, conceivably, cause Firewall/Proxy logs to show me visiting sites I never actually clicked on. While it has gotten better, a badly phrased query can cause certain sites that the corporate masters would frown on to show up as accessed by me. A skillful defense attorney could probably use this behavior to introduce reasonable doubt in a wrongful-termination suit that used firewall/proxy logs as evidence.
I don't know if such information is cached out to RAM or Disk browser-cache, but I suspect not. If it does land in the disk-cache, it could be pulled out by a forensic analysis and misinterpreted as an 'active hit' rather than the 'passive hit' it really was. The tell there would probably be the history file. Hmm.
It also struck me as a possible vector for malware. Happily, Firefox isn't rendering the retrieved information so that reduces the areas of bad-ness that malware authors can use. Not that we've heard of any bugs relating to the pre-cache feature.
Disclaimer: WWU doesn't operate a firewall or web-proxy servers. ResTek does, but that's a separate network. This is a theoretical exercise.
Then it hit me. That's activity that I don't control. That's activity that could, conceivably, cause Firewall/Proxy logs to show me visiting sites I never actually clicked on. While it has gotten better, a badly phrased query can cause certain sites that the corporate masters would frown on to show up as accessed by me. A skillful defense attorney could probably use this behavior to introduce reasonable doubt in a wrongful-termination suit that used firewall/proxy logs as evidence.
I don't know if such information is cached out to RAM or Disk browser-cache, but I suspect not. If it does land in the disk-cache, it could be pulled out by a forensic analysis and misinterpreted as an 'active hit' rather than the 'passive hit' it really was. The tell there would probably be the history file. Hmm.
It also struck me as a possible vector for malware. Happily, Firefox isn't rendering the retrieved information so that reduces the areas of bad-ness that malware authors can use. Not that we've heard of any bugs relating to the pre-cache feature.