Flash Cookies and Tor.

Matthew pumpkin at cotse.net
Mon Aug 2 07:11:05 UTC 2010


  On 31/07/10 02:43, andrew at torproject.org wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 11:27:27PM +0100, pumpkin at cotse.net wrote 1.5K bytes in 29 lines about:
>> OK, to continue this - in the past I did use Tor with Flash enabled after
>> having Flash cookies on the hard drive from surfing when I was not using
>> Tor.  In your opinion, is it likely that some websites would use these
>> Flash cookies to realise that the person surfing with Tor is the same
>> person who was surfing days / weeks / months earlier when not using Tor?
>> Would they then be able to connect non-Tor IPs to the person currently
>> using Tor (me)?
> Yes.
> http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/09/new-cookie-technologies-harder-see-and-remove-wide
>
I had not read this article before but I had read EPIC's analysis of flash 
cookies: http://epic.org/privacy/cookies/flash.html

I had also read the scholarly article here: 
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1446862

None of these three articles mention IP addresses.  Am I to assume that it 
is a given that the flash component of Gmail will automatically grab the IP 
address (when connecting in a non-Tor state) and then connect that IP to 
the IP addresses that connected in a Tor state through the flash cookie 
(providing flash is on when connecting in a Tor state).

In other words do you think IP addresses are not mentioned in these 
articles because a) it is taken as a given that the flash cookie is used to 
determine the "real" IP or b) because it is not actually guaranteed that IP 
addresses will be connected through flash cookies?


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