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POSTER: Performance signatures of mobile phone browsers

Published: 04 November 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Several fingerprinting techniques for computer browsers have been proposed to make it possible to link together different browser sessions and possibly tie them to a user identity. As most of these techniques depend on static browser characteristics and user-installed plugins, the resulting fingerprints are not suitable for mobile browsers because of the similarity of browser characteristics on similar mobile device products in spite of the differences in software and hardware. Moreover, mobile devices are shipped with pre-installed plugins that cannot be modified, which limits browser uniqueness. Therefore, we propose a dynamic mobile browser fingerprinting technique that records the browser's behavior and execution characteristics by running background customized browser scripts. Our dynamic technique is based on the use of Javascript, HTML5, Flash, and other scripts that are used to generate performance signatures of mobile browsers to detect the browser used, the operating system version, and device type. Our browser detection technique compares the active browser session signature with existing signatures through three detection methods: (1) Euclidean Distance, (2) Cosine Similarity, and (3) Voting System. In this paper we compare the detection rates of these methods and their accuracy in determining the mobile browser in use.

References

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P. Eckersley. How unique is your web browser? In Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Privacy enhancing technologies, PETS'10, pages 1--18, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2010. Springer-Verlag.
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J.-L. Gasse and F. Filloux. Measuring time spent on a web page, 2010.
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K. Mowery, D. Bogenreif, S. Yilek, and H. Shacham. Fingerprinting information in JavaScript implementations. In Proceedings of Web 2.0 Security and Privacy 2011 (W2SP), San Franciso, May 2011.
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N. Nikiforakis, L. Invernizzi, A. Kapravelos, S. Van Acker, W. Joosen, C. Kruegel, F. Piessens, and G. Vigna. You are what you include: large-scale evaluation of remote javascript inclusions. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM conference on Computer and communications security, CCS '12, pages 736--747, Raleigh, NC, USA, 2012. ACM.
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L. Olejnik, C. Castelluccia, and A. Janc. Why Johnny Can't Browse in Peace: On the Uniqueness of Web Browsing History Patterns. In 5th Workshop on Hot Topics in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (HotPETs), Vigo, July 2012.
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T.-F. Yen, Y. Xie, F. Yu, R. P. Yu, and M. Abadi. Host fingerprinting and tracking on the web:privacy and security implications. In Proceedings of the 19th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2012.

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
CCS '13: Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGSAC conference on Computer & communications security
November 2013
1530 pages
ISBN:9781450324779
DOI:10.1145/2508859
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 04 November 2013

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Author Tags

  1. browser fingerprinting signatures
  2. browser script engines
  3. cosine similarity
  4. euclidean distance

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CCS'13
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CCS '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 105 of 530 submissions, 20%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,261 of 6,999 submissions, 18%

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