{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/quantifying-user-password-exposure-to-third","title":"Quantifying User Password Exposure to Third-Party CDNs","arxiv_id":"2301.03690","date":"2023-01-09","proceeding":null,"authors":["Rui Xin","Shihan Lin","Xiaowei Yang"],"abstract":"Web services commonly employ Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) for performance and security. As web traffic is becoming 100% HTTPS, more and more websites allow CDNs to terminate their HTTPS connections. This practice may expose a website's user sensitive information such as a user's login password to a third-party CDN. In this paper, we measure and quantify the extent of user password exposure to third-party CDNs. We find that among Alexa top 50K websites, at least 12,451 of them use CDNs and contain user login entrances. Among those websites, 33% of them expose users' passwords to the CDNs, and a popular CDN may observe passwords from more than 40% of its customers. This result suggests that if a CDN infrastructure has a vulnerability or an insider attack, many users' accounts will be at risk. If we assume the attacker is a passive eavesdropper, a website can avoid this vulnerability by encrypting users' passwords in HTTPS connections. Our measurement shows that less than 17% of the websites adopt this countermeasure.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.03690v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.03690v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"quantifying-user-password-exposure-to-third","repo_url":"https://github.com/shiftlin/pam2023-cdnpassword","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}