Paper Info
Title
Beauty and the Beast: Diverting Modern Web Browsers to Build Unique Browser Fingerprints
Abstract
Worldwide, the number of people and the time spent browsing the web keeps increasing. Accordingly, the technologies to enrich the user experience are evolving at an amazing pace. Many of these evolutions provide for a more interactive web (e.g., boom of JavaScript libraries, weekly innovations in HTML5), a more available web (e.g., explosion of mobile devices), a more secure web (e.g., Flash is disappearing, NPAPI plugins are being deprecated), and a more private web (e.g., increased legislation against cookies, huge success of extensions such as Ghostery and AdBlock). Nevertheless, modern browser technologies, which provide the beauty and power of the web, also provide a darker side, a rich ecosystem of exploitable data that can be used to build unique browser fingerprints. Our work explores the validity of browser fingerprinting in today's environment. Over the past year, we have collected 118,934 fingerprints composed of 17 attributes gathered thanks to the most recent web technologies. We show that innovations in HTML5 provide access to highly discriminating attributes, notably with the use of the Canvas API which relies on multiple layers of the user's system. In addition, we show that browser fingerprinting is as effective on mobile devices as it is on desktops and laptops, albeit for radically different reasons due to their more constrained hardware and software environments. We also evaluate how browser fingerprinting could stop being a threat to user privacy if some technological evolutions continue (e.g., disappearance of plugins) or are embraced by browser vendors (e.g., standard HTTP headers).
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1109/SP.2016.57
2016 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)
Keywords
Field
DocType
browser fingerprinting,privacy,software diversity
Web design,Web API,World Wide Web,Internet privacy,Web page,Computer science,Computer security,Comet (programming),Web navigation,Web application,Client-side scripting,Rich Internet application
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1081-6011
978-1-5090-0825-4
31
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.22
8
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Pierre Laperdrix1647.97
Walter Rudametkin2401.75
Benoit Baudry32000118.08