In today’s Internet culture, companies are largely focused on learning more about their audiences. They are interested in gathering data on who is visiting their website, how frequently, and their users’ overall Internet behavior. Browser fingerprinting is a commonly used technique that allows the tracking and identification of users in an untraceable, efficient manner. Browser fingerprinting consists of collecting seemingly generic data about a user’s browser family (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc), browser version, operating system, fonts available, and more to create a unique “fingerprint” for each person. It can be used maliciously against users, as having access to a user’s identity and their computer’s configuration can make it easier for cyber criminals to launch targeted, more effective attacks. Although many are not aware of what exactly a browser fingerprint is, studies show users find online behavioral advertising and history tracking creepy and an invasion of privacy.
The goal of this project is to create an Internet browsing experience in which users’ behavior is unable to be tracked, rendering browser fingerprinting useless. One method proposed by a previous study, “PriVaricator: Deceiving Fingerprinters with Little White Lies” involves modifying a Chromium browser by randomizing the values of those attributes collected by browser fingerprinters. This still allows a user’s fingerprint to be created and stored, but causes the user to look unique at every website visit therefore unlinking their browsing history from previous or future occurrences. We propose further modifications to the Chromium browser that would lie about additional attributes to hopefully achieve a uniqueness rate that will be statistically significantly higher than previously found in the PriVaricator study. We measure our browser fingerprinting countermeasure’s success by running it against FP-TESTER test suites and analyzing the program’s overhead and visual representations of webpages.