SnailLoad Allows Attackers to Trace Visited Websites By Measuring Network Latency

SnailLoad is a newly disclosed remote network side-channel research demonstrating that an attacker-controlled server can send a resource extremely slowly to measure latency changes on a victim's last-mile connection and infer browsing activity and video playback; the researchers released a PoC and demo, reported the issue to Google, achieved up to 98% accuracy for YouTube video identification in tests, and note mitigations are challenging because the root cause is fundamental bandwidth asymmetry.