Session Security

wilmot

I am developing a wesite for a charity that helps victims of domestic violence.

One of my and my client's concerns is that if a victim/survivour logs onto our site s/he should be able to delete all trace of their having visited from their computer. This is in order for them to protect their safety should their abusive partner check the computer to see what they have been up to.

I am confident that I can give browser and machine specific advice on deleting page history.

I need to know if there is any way someone with total access to the computer used to browse our website can find the POSTDATA used if the history for the page visited has been deleted. Also will the use of sessions (for users who want to log in to private areas of the site) compromise this?

Any advice would be much appreciated.

justsomeone

This is a very, very difficult area to give guarantees on, especially in the environment you are discussing.

As you suspect, deleting the history doesn't wipe all details. This link here discusses the perils of Internet Explorer's index.dat file. It also suggests that Firefox does something similar.

Also, remember that deleted files can be undeleted as well. Depending on how forensic the person looking for this info wants to get, more and more tools are at their disposal. Also, even it can be wiped clean, this could be the sort of situation where the absence of a history is deemed enough of a problem. If someone is going through the browser history and finds that it has been deleted, that might trigger the reaction that whoever deleted the history is trying to hide something, with horrible consequences.

Finally, watch out for any keyloggers installed. These could sniff and record any keystrtokes and store them for later retreival. This could be a hardware or software deal.

Any PC running any software is prone to revealing what you've been up to. The ideal solution (though maybe not practical in this situation) is to use public computers.

wilmot

Thanks very much justsomeone for taking the trouble to help.

justsomeone wrote:
This is a very, very difficult area to give guarantees on, especially in the environment you are discussing..

Yeah don't I know it!!!

Thanks for pointing me at index.dat - it is useful to know!!

AS for deleting history I think I've got that coverred - I am going to advise our users to selectively delete the history not flush the lot!

My main concern is that the abusive partner will get hold of usernames and passwords as one of the things I am considerring for phase 2 is a mutual support bulletin board.

Thanks