JShelter: Give Me My Browser Back
Abstract
The web is used daily by billions. Even so, users are not protected from many threats by default. This position paper builds on previous web privacy and security research and introduces JShelter, a webextension that fights to return the browser to users. Moreover, we introduce a library helping with common webextension development tasks and fixing loopholes misused by previous research. JShelter focuses on fingerprinting prevention, limitations of rich web APIs, prevention of attacks connected to timing, and learning information about the device, the browser, the user, and surrounding physical environment and location. We discovered a loophole in the sensor timestamps that lets any page observe the device boot time if sensor APIs are enabled in Chromium-based browsers. JShelter provides a fingerprinting report and other feedback that can be used by future security research and data protection authorities. Thousands of users around the world use the webextension every day.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2204.01392,
title = {JShelter: Give Me My Browser Back},
author = {Libor Polčák and Marek Saloň and Giorgio Maone and Radek Hranický and Michael McMahon},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.01392},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
Paper update after internal review, update according to the latest development, transform into extended version of the SECRYPT paper that was accepted