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Interesting that you mention the privacy risk of tracking, as this[0] just appeared in my Twitter feed at about the same time I was reading HN.

"Tracking Users across the Web via TLS Session Resumption"[1]. A snippet from the abstract: "Our results indicate that with the standard setting of the session resumption lifetime in many current browsers, the average user can be tracked for up to eight days. With a session resumption lifetime of seven days, as recommended upper limit in the draft for TLS version 1.3, 65% of all users in our dataset can be tracked permanently."

Not exactly looking forward to TLS1.3, it appears to be a move forward in security but with no (or worse) privacy benefits that I've seen so far.

[0]https://twitter.com/durumcrustulum/status/105293632402455757...

[1]http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/1810.07304




> with the standard setting of the session resumption lifetime in many current browsers

> seven days, as recommended upper limit

Do we fix this by changing that setting to a few hours?

Edit: the report discusses this: "The recommended upper limit of the session resumption lifetime in TLS 1.3 [19] of seven days should be reduced to hinder tracking based on this mechanism. We propose an upper lifetime limit of ten minutes based on our empirical observations"


Is this a configurable option in Firefox?


The links to the full paper in your second link led me to a 404 page. Found it here: https://svs.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/publications/2018/2018...

looks interesting, thanks!




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