How unique is your web browser?
PETS'10 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Privacy enhancing technologies
You are what you include: large-scale evaluation of remote javascript inclusions
Proceedings of the 2012 ACM conference on Computer and communications security
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Several fingerprinting techniques for computer browsers have been proposed to make it possible to link together different browser sessions and possibly tie them to a user identity. As most of these techniques depend on static browser characteristics and user-installed plugins, the resulting fingerprints are not suitable for mobile browsers because of the similarity of browser characteristics on similar mobile device products in spite of the differences in software and hardware. Moreover, mobile devices are shipped with pre-installed plugins that cannot be modified, which limits browser uniqueness. Therefore, we propose a dynamic mobile browser fingerprinting technique that records the browser's behavior and execution characteristics by running background customized browser scripts. Our dynamic technique is based on the use of Javascript, HTML5, Flash, and other scripts that are used to generate performance signatures of mobile browsers to detect the browser used, the operating system version, and device type. Our browser detection technique compares the active browser session signature with existing signatures through three detection methods: (1) Euclidean Distance, (2) Cosine Similarity, and (3) Voting System. In this paper we compare the detection rates of these methods and their accuracy in determining the mobile browser in use.