Real-time privacy-preserving cobrowsing with element masking

Collaborative Web Browsing (cobrowsing) becomes more and more popular in commercial solutions. Cobrowsing allows different users to share a synchronized common view on a web page as well as sharing the interactions, such as mouse movements, highlighting text or mouse clicks, on this web page with each other. This makes it interesting for a wide range of use cases, such as customer relationship management, call center or online sales. Nevertheless existing solutions are vulnerable to man in the middle attacks by the cobrowsing server when using the secure hypertext transfer protocol (HTTPS) and they leak private data of the user to other third parties, which may potentially misuse them. We present in this paper a solution to these issues by letting a user act as proxy between the web application provider and other users. This enables the user (1) to control which web application data is propagated to whom (2) to enforce privacy policies upon private data within a cobrowse session. We present our implementation, which does not rely on browser plugins or extensions, but only on existing web standards.