Not All Browsers Are Created Equal: Comparing Web Browser Fingerprintability

Abstract

Browsers and their users can be tracked even in the absence of a persistent IP address or cookie. Unique and hence identifying pieces of information, making up what is known as a fingerprint, can be collected from browsers by a visited website, e.g. using JavaScript. However, browsers vary in precisely what information they make available, and hence their fingerprintability may also vary. In this paper, we report on the results of experiments examining the fingerprintable attributes made available by a range of modern browsers. We tested the most widely used browsers for both desktop and mobile platforms. The results reveal significant differences between browsers in terms of their fingerprinting potential, meaning that the choice of browser has significant privacy implications.

A Large-scale Empirical Analysis of Browser Fingerprints Properties for Web Authentication

“…Indeed, we can expect foreign users to have a combination of contextual attributes (e.g., timezone, languages) different from the French users, making them distinguishable even if the remaining attributes have identical values. Al-Fannah and Li [2] found out that browser families are not equally fingerprintable (e.g., Safari browsers are less distinguishable than Chrome browsers). Although the fingerprintability of the browser families of the studied population impacts the obtained distinctiveness, studying this aspect is out of the scope of this paper.…”

“…These contexts use the WebGL library 18 that leverages hardware accelerations to render and manipulate two-dimensional graphics, but also three-dimensional scenes. Canvas fingerprinting was first introduced by Mowery et al [33] by using the webgl context, but afterwards most studies focused on the 2d context [2,7,10,48]. This can result from the unreliability of the method encountered by Laperdrix et al [29], for which Cao et al [11] proposed a remedy by setting specific parameters.…”