Local frames: exploiting inherited origins to bypass content blockers
summary
Local pages create about:blank local frames that inherit their parent origin so many blockers misread the initiator and treat tracker or fingerprinting requests as first‑party. The study crawls ~22,000 sites, finds local frames on 56% of popular sites, 62% of those call trackers and 35% call fingerprinting APIs, and identifies 19 implementation bugs across Safari content blocker APIs, Brave iOS, AdGuard, DuckDuckGo etc.; 15 of 19 are patched after disclosure. A Brave iOS async resource‑replacement polyfill also introduces a bypass.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Introduction and setup
- 1:28Paper overview and findings
- 3:31Content blockers overview
- 4:35Local frames explained
- 6:43Inherited origins vulnerability
- 7:26Practical exploit demonstration
- 8:31Vulnerability impact assessment
- 9:38Case study Safari content blocker
- 10:40Case study Brave iOS
- 12:05Case study AdGuard
- 13:31Prevalence on the web
- 15:42Future solutions and fixes
- 16:57Q&A session
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