Richard Chirgwin reports:
HTTPS may be good at securing financial transactions, but it isn’t much use as a privacy tool: US researchers have found that a traffic analysis of ten HTTPS-secured Web sites yielded “personal data such as medical conditions, legal or financial affairs or sexual orientation”.
In I Know Why You Went to the Clinic: Risks and Realization of HTTPS Traffic Analysis, (Arxiv, here), UC Berkeley researchers Brad Miller, AD Joseph and JD Tygar and Intel Labs’ Ling Huang show that even encrypted Web traffic can leave enough breadcrumbs on the trail to be retraced.
Read more on The Register.