Communications of the ACM
Private Browsing Gets More Private
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University have developed a system to improve private browsing.
Credit: MIT News
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University have developed the Veil system to improve private browsing by guaranteeing that any data the browser loads into memory remains encrypted until it is displayed on-screen.
Instead of typing a URL into the browser's address bar, users go to the Veil website to enter it, and a "blinding server" transmits a version of the requested page that has been translated into the Veil format. Embedded within the page is code that renders the page data indecipherable until it passes through a decryption algorithm.
The blinding servers also randomly insert meaningless code into every page they serve, changing the appearance of the underlying source file.
Veil further augments security with an option in which the server opens the requested page itself and takes a picture of it; only the picture is sent to the Veil user, so no executable code winds up in the user's computer.
From MIT News
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