The rich programming interfaces (APIs) provided by web browsers can be diverted to collect a browser fingerprint. A small number of queries on these interfaces are sufficient to build a fingerprint that is statistically unique and very stable over time. Consequently, the fingerprint can be used to track users. Our work aims at mitigating the risk of browser fingerprinting for users privacy by 'breaking' the stability of a fingerprint over time. We add randomness in the computation of selected browser functions, in order to have them deliver slightly different answers for each browsing session. Randomization is possible thanks to the following properties of browsers implementations: (i) some functions have a nondeterministic specification, but a deterministic implementation; (ii) multimedia functions can be slightly altered without deteriorating user's perception. We present FPRandom, a modified version of Firefox that adds randomness to mitigate the most recent fingerprinting algorithms, namely canvas fingerprinting, AudioContext fingerprinting and the unmasking of browsers through the order of JavaScript properties. We evaluate the effectiveness of FPRandom by testing it against known fingerprinting tests. We also conduct a user study and evaluate the performance overhead of randomization to determine the impact on the user experience.
This work considers the problem of observer design for rectangular descriptor systems with nonlinearities satisfying incremental quadratic constraints. The observer design is feasible under the satisfaction of a linear matrix inequality and some algebraic relations in the system matrices. The special case of nonlinearities in the output is also considered. Finally, the developed approach is applied to the problem of secure communications and illustrated through numerical examples.
The fundamental lemma due to Willems et al. "A note on persistency of excitation," Syst. Control Lett., vol. 54, no. 4, pp. 325-329, 2005 plays an important role in system identification and data-driven control. One of the assumptions for the fundamental lemma is that the underlying linear timeinvariant system is controllable. In this paper, the fundamental lemma is extended to address system identification for uncontrollable systems. Then, a data-driven algebraic test is derived to check whether the underlying system is controllable or not. An algorithm based on the singular value decomposition of a Hankel matrix constructed from the data is provided to implement the developed test. The algorithm has cubic computational cost. Examples are given to illustrate the theoretical results.
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