Researchers found a way to spy on your browsing by watching your SSD's activity
Researchers have discovered a new method to spy on browsing activity by monitoring the timing behavior of solid-state drives. This technique, known as FROST, uses JavaScript to interact with the Origin Private File System and can determine which other sites and applications are active on the device. The attack works by creating a large file and repeatedly reading from it, recording the time each operation takes and forming recognizable patterns over time.
- ▪The FROST side-channel attack exploits the timing behavior of solid-state drives to detect background apps and user behavior.
- ▪The method uses JavaScript to interact with the Origin Private File System and can work across different browsers.
- ▪The attack requires generating a large file, likely at least one gigabyte, and depends on the monitored activity occurring on the same physical SSD.
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| Original publisher | TechSpot |
| Canonical URL | https://www.techspot.com/news/112562-researchers-found-way-spy-browsing-watching-ssd-activity.html |
| Publication time | Thu, 28 May 2026 13:46 -0500 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-28T19:14:58.152Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-28T19:15:04.679Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Z3emjji0NRu- · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Security Hardware ssd spying Researchers found a way to spy on your browsing by watching your SSD's activity The FROST side-channel attack turns storage requests into a tool for detecting background apps, open tabs, and user behavior By Skye Jacobs May 28, 2026, 13:46 Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. Looking ahead: A research team in Austria has identified a new way for websites to quietly observe what users are doing on their devices using nothing more than a browser and faint signals from the machine's own hardware. The technique does not rely on cookies, click-tracking scripts, or the fingerprinting methods that have become familiar over the years. Instead, it exploits the timing behavior of solid-state drives.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechSpot.
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