fingerprint hardware tracking windows installing

Line, Curve, and Anti-aliasing - Researchers can measure how browsers render lines, curves and anti-aliasing operations in HTML5 Canvas and WebGL. Researchers query a list of locally installed fonts or determine if certain fonts are installed based on how predetermined font characters (glyphs) are rendered inside the browser. List of Fonts - SBF technique that researchers adapted to work in CBF tracking. Measuring the output of AudioContext operations can identify the same user across different browsers, based on how the audio signal is processed. This is the same for most browsers, and for those that alter this value, it can be easily calculated (e.g, multiplied by two for Safari).ĪudioContext - AudioContext provides a bundle of audio signal processing functionalities from signal generation to signal filtering with the help of the audio stack in the OS and the audio card. Number of CPU Virtual Cores - The browser parameter named hardwareConcurrency that provides the browser's maximum threshold in Web Worker operations. Researchers discovered that by taking browser zoom levels into account, this measurement could be used reliably. Screen Resolution - Also used for single-browser fingerprinting (SBF) but thought to be unusable for CBF. Cross-browser fingerprintable featuresĪccording to the three-man research team led by Assistant Professor Yinzhi Cao from the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Lehigh University, the following browser features could be (ab)used for cross-browser fingerprinting operations. This is because the GPU card is the one carrying out this operation and not the browser software.

Researchers measured the response to these operations and used this information to identify the different hardware rigs, specific to distinct users, regardless of the browser accessing a test website.įor example, making a browser apply an image to the side of a 3D cube in WebGL provides a similar response in hardware parameters for all browsers. These new techniques rely on making browsers carry out operations that use the underlying hardware components to process the desired data. Named 'cross-browser fingerprinting' (CBF), this practice relies on new technologies added to web browsers in recent years, some of which had been previously considered unreliable for cross-browser tracking and only used for single browser fingerprinting. A team of researchers from universities across the US has identified different fingerprinting techniques that can track users when they use different browsers installed on the same machine.

Fingerprint hardware tracking windows installing