Related papers: Assessing Web Fingerprinting Risk
Digital fingerprints have brought great convenience and benefits to many online businesses. However, they pose a significant threat to the privacy and security of ordinary users. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of current…
Browser fingerprinting is a stateless identification technique based on browser properties. Together, they form an identifier that can be collected without users' notice and has been studied to be unique and stable. As this technique relies…
Website fingerprinting enables an attacker to infer which web page a client is browsing through encrypted or anonymized network connections. We present a new website fingerprinting technique based on random decision forests and evaluate…
This paper introduces adF, a novel system for analyzing the vulnerability of different devices, Operating Systems (OSes), and browsers to web fingerprinting. adF performs its measurements from code inserted in ads. We have used our system…
The collapse of social contexts has been amplified by digital infrastructures but surprisingly received insufficient attention from Web privacy scholars. Users are persistently identified within and across distinct Web contexts, in varying…
People are becoming increasingly concerned with their online privacy, especially with how advertising companies track them across websites (a practice called cross-site tracking), as reconstructing a user's browser history can reveal…
Throughout recent years, the importance of internet-privacy has continuously risen. [...] Browser fingerprinting is a technique that does not require cookies or persistent identifiers. It derives a sufficiently unique identifier from the…
The possibility of fingerprinting the search keywords issued by a user on popular web search engines is a significant threat to user privacy. This threat has received surprisingly little attention in the network traffic analysis literature.…
Browser fingerprinting often provides an attractive alternative to third-party cookies for tracking users across the web. In fact, the increasing restrictions on third-party cookies placed by common web browsers and recent regulations like…
Recent works showed that websites can detect browser extensions that users install and websites they are logged into. This poses significant privacy risks, since extensions and Web logins that reflect user's behavior, can be used to…
Compact user representations (such as embeddings) form the backbone of personalization services. In this work, we present a new theoretical framework to measure re-identification risk in such user representations. Our framework, based on…
Modern applications increasingly interact with web APIs -- reusable components, deployed and operated outside the application, and accessed over the network. Their existence, arguably, spurs application innovations, making it easy to…
Device fingerprinting over the web has received much attention both by the research community and the commercial market a like. Almost all the fingerprinting features proposed to date depend on software run on the device. All of these…
We measure how effective Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) are at protecting users from website fingerprinting. Our measurements use both experimental and observational methods. Experimental methods allow control, precision, and use on…
With this paper, we survey the research performed in the domain of browser fingerprinting, while providing an accessible entry point to newcomers in the field. We explain how this technique works and where it stems from. We analyze the…
Device fingerprinting is a widely used technique that allows a third party to identify a particular device. Applications of device fingerprinting include authentication, attacker identification, or software license binding. Device…
Automated browsers are widely used to study the web at scale. Their premise is that they measure what regular browsers would encounter on the web. In practice, deviations due to detection of automation have been found. To what extent…
Although the security benefits of domain name encryption technologies such as DNS over TLS (DoT), DNS over HTTPS (DoH), and Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) are clear, their positive impact on user privacy is weakened by--the still exposed--IP…
Recent developments in online tracking make it harder for individuals to detect and block trackers. Some sites have deployed indirect tracking methods, which attempt to uniquely identify a device by asking the browser to perform a…
Browser fingerprinting consists into collecting attributes from a web browser. Hundreds of attributes have been discovered through the years. Each one of them provides a way to distinguish browsers, but also comes with a usability cost…