History sniffing is a class of web vulnerabilities and attacks that allow a website to track a user's web browsing history activities by recording which websites a user has visited and which the user has not. This is done by leveraging long-standing information leakage issues inherent to the design of the web platform, one of the most well-known of which includes detecting CSS attribute changes in links that the user has already visited.
Despite being known about since 2002, history sniffing is still considered an unsolved problem. In 2010, researchers revealed that multiple high-profile websites had used history sniffing to identify and track users. Shortly afterwards, Mozilla and all other major web browsers implemented defences against history sniffing. However, recent research has shown that these mitigations are ineffective against specific variants of the attack and history sniffing can still occur via visited links and newer browser features.
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