Do privacy studies help? A Retrospective look at Canvas Fingerprinting

freedom-to-tinker.com

39 points·randomwalker··4 comments

There's a follow-up to this post here: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/englehardt/the-web-privac...

And here's our open-source tool that we've been using to do all these privacy measurements: https://github.com/citp/OpenWPM/

We'd love to see pull requests or just other people using our tool for new interesting findings.

Kudos to the Princeton team on yet another interesting find! I recently submitted the work on de-anonymizing programmers from binary signatures using machine learning that was also fascinating (not to mention a bit scary)

But I confess I'm perplexed as to how a canvas render can yield a consistent unique fingerprint? Even allowing for subtleties in font anti aliasing implementations amongst drivers, wouldn't two machines with identical gpu hardware and drivers be identical down to the last pixel? And what about browsers using software rendering?

My interest is purely academic of course ;)

These are great posts!

I've recently discovered https://www.browserleaks.com/ which has tests for several sorts of browser fingerprinting.

Edit: The follow-up post cites the W3C draft on fingerprinting: "elimination of the capability of browser fingerprinting by a determined adversary through solely technical means that are widely deployed is implausible". But there is a simple strategy. Just compartmentalize online activity, such that everything that a particular persona does can be safely linked by adversaries. And it's fun!

One to add (HSTS): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10895933

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