Identificando Indicadores de Browser Fingerprinting em Páginas Web

Abstract

Fingerprinting techniques are those employed to identify (or re-identify) a user or device through a set of attributes (device screen size, installed software versions, and many others) and other observable characteristics during the communication process. Commonly known as website fingerprinting, such techniques can be used as a security measure (for user authentication, for example) and as a sales/marketing mechanism. On the other hand, they can also be considered a potential threat to users’ web privacy since sensitive and personal data can be captured and used for malicious purposes in various attacks and fraud types. In this context, this dissertation proposes a method to detect fingerprinting calls to JavaScript information provider objects on web pages and to measure the level of disrespect to user privacy. We evaluated the method in different web page databases (new and others used by other works). The results prove that previous work generated too many false positives and were unable to detect a set of related JavaScript objects formed by new Date().getTime(), this.width, this.height navigator.userAgent, document.cookie to Browser Fingerprinting.