Tips, Tricks
& Treats

Chrome not Safely Deleting Browsing History

When deleting the Chrome browser cache, some history items may prevail. Not for good.

(2015/05/19) When you delete all of your browsing cache, including the history, you expect Chrome to do exactly that, right? But that's not what you always get. macconfig recently discovered a bug in Chrome's delete function which accounts for some URLs to prevail in the history - you can delete it as often as you want, they just won't go away. Although this doesn't seem to be a major vulnerability, it can be a privacy issue for some users, and it becomes a concern for all others if your Mac is stolen or you inadvertently accessed by someone else.

The mean thing is that these "lost" history items won't show up directly in Chrome's app history, but are hidden in the database that Chrome uses to store the history items. This database is easily accessible from the terminal. Let's see how a typical Chrome history looks like:

Chrome history items before deleting.

To see your own browsing history, as saved in Chrome's database, open the Terminal app and enter the following command:

sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome/Default/History 'select * from "urls"'

This should result in an output similar to the one shown in the picture above. Note the fourth column (a column is text or a number separated by |), this is the so called visit count: an indicator how often you visited this URL (it doesn't necessarily give a fair account, but that's another story). It should usually be greater than zero, because you've already visited any item in the history, right? Here comes the problem: We haven't been able to discover why, but Chrome sometimes zeroes this visit counter. That wouldn't be of any importance, but it appears that when you "Clear Browsing Data" within Chrome (from the Chrome menu), even when selecting "Browsing history", Chrome ignores entries with a zero visit count.

Clearing the browsing history does not clear all entries.

The result is that these items remain in the history. You won't find them in the browser, though, because there it doesn't show items with a zero count (which seems right, they shouldn't be in the history in any case). But you can still find them in the database, the command is the same as above:

Items with a zero visit count remain in the history.

The only way to safely delete these history items is to use the command line again and type the following command:

sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome/Default/History 'delete from "urls"'

This will delete all your history items for good. Safely.

Caveat: The bug we found adds to the knowledge that even the "Private Surfing" modes of the major browsers are not safe, as recently evidenced by the favicon bug in Safari (fixed in Safari 8.0.5). We could not reproduce this bug on all machines or with all accounts, though, but we found considerable evidence. There seemed to be no relation to different configurations. However, the visit count doesn't seem to be the only trigger, as it doesn't help in reproducing the bug to zero some entry's visit count or to add a new dummy entry with sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome/Default/History 'INSERT INTO "urls" VALUES (33, "www.mydomain.com", "MyDomain.com", 0, 0, 0, 0, 0)' - this one will be deleted by using the built-in function. Let us know if you find out why it happens!

UPDATE: We filed this as Chromium bug #490913. (MacConfig)

Ad