Security considerations in hsync * Server-generated signatures If we let the server use server-generated signatures, then it can store any opaque data it likes inside them. This is basically equivalent to always allowing the server to store cookies on the users disk, which is a bit undesirable. If the server wanted to tell when a particular cache was accessing it, then it could do so by this means. Of course, normally it could do this anyhow, by matching on for example the source address. We're only giving something away when we are otherwise taking precautions to maintain anonymity by turning off cookies and so on. Still, it would be a cool way to e.g. match up people's banner impressions when they have cookies turned off for images. In fact, you can imagine doing exactly the same thing using modification dates on a dynamically-generated resource: we just give the user a fake date whose time_t value uniquely keys the user. Unless the user agent's cache is flushed or disabled the server can tell who they are by looking for If-Modified-Since headers. Cute!