Detecting if a cross-site page triggered a navigation (or didn’t) can be useful to an attacker. For example, a website may trigger a navigation in a certain endpoint depending on the status of the user. To detect if any kind of navigation occurred, an attacker can: Use an iframe and count the number of times the onload event is triggered. Check the value of history.length, which is accessible through any window reference. ...
The principle of Cache Probing consists of detecting whether a resource was cached by the browser. The concept has been known since the beginning of the web 1 and initially relied on detecting timing differences. When a user visits a website, some resources such as images, scripts, and HTML content are fetched and later cached by the browser (under certain conditions). This optimization makes future navigations faster as the browser serves those resources from disk instead of requesting them again. ...