In a test that collected 3,615 fingerprints from 1,903 users over a three-month period, the technique was able to successfully identify 99.2 percent of users.
![hardware fingerprint blocker hardware fingerprint blocker](https://media.springernature.com/lw785/springer-static/image/prt%3A978-0-387-73003-5%2F6/MediaObjects/978-0-387-73003-5_6_Part_Fig1-47_HTML.jpg)
#Hardware fingerprint blocker code
The researchers have launched this website to demonstrate the techniques and have released the corresponding source code here. The new tracking technique relies on JavaScript code that's compact enough to run quickly in the background while visitors are focused on a specific task, such as reading text or viewing video. The extracted features can be used for both single- and cross-browser fingerprinting. Specifically, because many of such OS and hardware level functions are exposed to JavaScript via browser APIs, we can extract features when asking the browser to perform certain tasks through these APIs. We propose a (cross-)browser fingerprinting based on many novel OS and hardware level features, e.g., these from graphics card, CPU, audio stack, and installed writing scripts. In order to defeat the privacy violation, we believe that we need to know our enemy well." Advertisement "Our work makes the scenario even worse, because after the user switches browsers, the ads company can still recognize the user. "From the negative perspective, people can use our cross-browser tracking to violate users' privacy by providing customized ads," Yinzhi Cao, the lead researcher who is an assistant professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Lehigh University, told Ars. But fingerprinting also carries sobering privacy concerns.
![hardware fingerprint blocker hardware fingerprint blocker](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/14GKIpGPNRM/maxresdefault.jpg)
Based on that observation, the bank could check with the account holder by phone to make sure the login was legitimate. Banks, for instance, can use it to know that a person logging into an online account isn't using the computer that has been used on every previous visit. The new technique-outlined in a research paper titled (Cross-)Browser Fingerprinting via OS and Hardware Level Features-not only works across multiple browsers, it's also more accurate than previous single-browser fingerprinting.įingerprinting isn't automatically bad and, in some cases, offers potential benefits to end users. This constraint made it infeasible to tie, say, the fingerprint left behind by a Firefox browser to the fingerprint from a Chrome or Edge installation running on the same machine. Until now, however, the tracking has been limited to a single browser. Such fingerprints are the result of specific settings and customizations found in a specific browser installation, including the list of plugins, the selected time zone, whether a "do not track" option is turned on, and whether an adblocker is being used. For instance, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's privacy tool, known as Panopticlick, found that only one in about 77,691 browsers had the same characteristics as the one commonly used by this reporter. State-of-the-art fingerprinting techniques are highly effective at identifying users when they use browsers with default or commonly used settings.
![hardware fingerprint blocker hardware fingerprint blocker](https://www.analog.com/-/media/images/analog-dialogue/en/volume-42/number-3/articles/fingerprint-sensor-blackfin-enhance-biometric-id-equip-design/fingerprint-fig-03.jpg)
This shatters a key defense against sites that identify visitors based on the digital fingerprint their browsers leave behind.
![hardware fingerprint blocker hardware fingerprint blocker](https://cdn.windowsreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/fingerprint-recognition.png)
Researchers have recently developed the first reliable technique for websites to track visitors even when they use two or more different browsers.