A Defense against JavaScript Object-Based Fingerprinting and Passive Fingerprinting

Browser fingerprinting is a mechanism that identifies and collects the attributes of a device and each of these attribute values are combined to generate a unique identifier for the related device which can be used for tracking purposes. There are quite a lot of API which allows a web application to access these attributes of the device, to identify the uniqueness of each device. Therefore websites are increasingly adopting fingerprinting techniques as a way to track users and their activities online. Unlike cookie-based tracking, browser fingerprinting is not regulated and happens silently without user knowledge, posing a serious threat to online user privacy. To counteract this privacy threat, this work aims at proposing a novel anti-fingerprinting browser extension that uses the technique of API normalization against JavaScript Object-based fingerprinting and Passive Fingerprinting. It helps the users to mask their unique attribute values with more generic values which enables them to easily blend in with the crowd and become less unique. We collected generic values for each attribute for spoofing and experimentally verified the effectiveness of our extension.