SURF CHROME

(SURFCHROME.COM) - How Incognito is Incognito Mode?  When I first heard about the Incognito Window within the Google Chrome browser, I thought it was a brilliant idea.  Some even refer to it as Porn Mode.  When I told my friend Samarjit Bharadwaj (Sam) who works as a government contractor at a Fortune 500 Company, I could literally hear his eyes rolling in the back of his turban.  It was explained that hard drive data is never truly deleted.  The data is still there but Windows makes the file invisible and marks the space as available for rewriting.  Furthermore, for those familiar with forensics, usually data recovery is as simple as finding the location of the deleted files, highlighting the hidden files you want to recover, then pressing a button.  Yes, it's that simple.  If you wanted to make data truly unrecoverable, the Department of Defense (DOD) standard is overwriting the data with a minimum of 7 passes.  To be sure, Sam suggested throwing the hard disk drive at one of those electromagnets they use at junk yards then melting it in a crematorium furnace for several hours.

I had a challenge for Sam and rushed over to his house to test Incognito Mode.  I wanted him to surf the web in Google Chrome via an Incognito Window then attempt tracing his activities via any file recovery methods.  As an engineer, Sam was more accustomed to visiting schematics and mathematical probabilities but I pointed him over to a celebrity picture site.  Sam seemed to have growing interest in pursuing this little experiment as he viewed thumbnails and clicked through various paparazzi photographs of Lidsay Lohan, Natalie Portman and Megan Fox among others.  I literally had to restrain him from further browsing since I think we had enough data in browsing history, cache and cookies.  After closing the Incognito Window, we are led to believe by Google that all traces of cache, history and cookies are unrecoverable.

While Sam's work software is proprietary and probably classified, he did suggest a good program that performs equally well called PC Inspector File Recovery.  The results were truly startling and unexpected.  There was no trace of cached images, history nor cookies.  The forensics program could only find one deleted file from the cache directory dated two days previously on Sept 2,2008.  There were no deleted files for the date of testing on Sep 5, 2008. The data was hidden even better than Osama bin Laden.

Sam made the conclusion that Incognito Mode might use one technique that circumvents data recovery software.  If a program writes to Random Access Memory (RAM), then the data is never written to the hard drive (virtual memory) and therefore never has to be deleted.  So thanks to the dropping prices of RAM chips, a portion of the 2GB standard could easily be allocated to Google Chrome.  Sam wanted privacy as he prepared his shrimp masala with jasmine rice so I had to excuse myself.  Personally, I think he wanted more time to surf privately in Incognito Mode.

Graphic: First image (left) captured before browsing via Incognito.  Second image (right) captured after browsing via Incognito.

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Chetan  - Great   |59.93.88.xxx |2008-09-07 04:28:25 That's great to see how secure the Incognito mode is! Reply | Quote 0   1

Mike  - flash-cookies survive   |88.74.174.xxx |2008-09-09 19:25:08 Unfortunatly Chrome's Incognito mode isn't really private. It keeps so-called "flash cookies" even after leaving the Incognito mode. So every website can still keep track on you using this technique. And other users of your computer can see where you have been surfed too. Reply | Quote 4   3

Chromable.com  - Bosses will ban it now!   |92.115.129.xxx |2008-09-10 11:41:12 I was just going to say - well done Google! Will browsing with Chrome will be banned now from work? But, what is it about this flash-cookies? Reply | Quote 0   0

sathish kumar  - re: flash-cookies survive   |220.226.14.xxx |2008-09-20 07:03:11 Mike wrote: Unfortunatly Chrome's Incognito mode isn't really private. It keeps so-called "flash cookies" even after leaving the Incognito mode. So every website can still keep track on you using this technique. And other users of your computer can see where you have been surfed too. Reply | Quote 0   0

Mike in Toledo  - Flash Cookies can be disabled   |72.241.92.xxx |2008-11-07 01:27:35 Flash Cookies can be disabled Go here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation... This is the Flash settings Manager. Step 1: Click on Web storage tab Step 2: Click on "Delete all sites" Step 3: Click on "Global Storage Settings" Step 4: Set the Bar there to "None" Step 5: Un-check "Allow third-party Flash content to store on your computer." Your done. Leave the other settings alone. You might want to put a short-cut for the Flash Manager on your desktop and also set it as bookmark - check in after you've surfed to make sure there are no flash cookies (aka Linked Shared Objects which will have an SOL extension) there. If find'em - just delete'me. Maybe some day the browser makers and Adobe will provide a button or link or configuration setting to shut of flash cookies. Don't hold your breath though. Fo... Reply | Quote 1   0

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