Publication

Page(s)	61 - 76
Title of proceedings	International Symposium on Engineering Secure Software and Systems (ESSoS 2018)
DOI	10.1007/978-3-319-94496-8_5

URL	http://scg.unibe.ch/archive/papers/Hazh18a.pdf
Type of Open Access	Website

WebRTC provides browsers and mobile apps with rich realtime communications capabilities, without the need for further software components. Recently, however, it has been shown that WebRTC can be triggered to fingerprint a web visitor, which may compromise the user's privacy. We evaluate the feasibility of exploiting a WebRTC IP leak to scan a user's private network ports and IP addresses from outside their local network. We propose a web-based network scanner that is both browser- and network-independent, and performs nearly as well as system-based scanners. We experiment with various popular mobile and desktop browsers on several platforms and show that adversaries not only can exploit WebRTC to identify the real user identity behind a web request, but also can retrieve sensitive information about the user's network infrastructure. We discuss the potential security and privacy consequences of this issue and present a browser extension that we developed to inform the user about the prospect of suspicious activities.