Fingerprinting Browsers in Encrypted Communications

Browser fingerprinting is the identification of a browser through the network traffic captured during communication between the browser and server. This can be done using the HTTP protocol, browser extensions, and other methods. This paper discusses browser fingerprinting using the HTTPS over TLS 1.3 protocol. The study observed that different browsers use a different number of messages to communicate with the server, and the length of messages also varies. To conduct the study, a network was set up using a UTM hypervisor with one virtual machine as the server and another as a VM with a different browser. The communication was captured, and it was found that there was a $30 \%-35 \%$ dissimilarity in the behavior of different browsers.