4 ms·

Audio Fingerprinting

30 points by Sami_Lehtinen 10y ago

Zikes 10y ago
The original study: http://randomwalker.info/publications/OpenWPM_1_million_site_tracking_measurement.pdf http://randomwalker.info/publications/OpenWPM_1_million_site... The relevant section of the study is "6.4 AudioContext Fingerprinting", on page 15. Notably, they link to an online tool they developed that demonstrates this fingerprinting technique [1] [1] https://audiofingerprint.openwpm.com/ https://audiofingerprint.openwpm.com/
ungzd 10y ago
Article is just recompilation of articles from other news sites, there is no explanation how it works and there is link to "acoustic fingerprint" article on Wikipedia which is about entirely different thing.
- hammock 10y ago
  Submission be revised to original source: http://www.zdnet.com/article/think-youre-not-being-tracked-now-websites-turn-to-audio-fingerprinting-to-follow-you/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/think-youre-not-being-tracked-n...
  - dang 10y ago
    The original source was posted and discussed extensively at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11729438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11729438.
cyphar 10y ago
I'm interested to see how long it takes the Tor Browser Bundle to get a fix for this attack.
muzakthings 10y ago
This is somewhat of a misnomer. For those of you who came here expecting acoustic fingerprinting, realize this is a different class of algorithms related to locality sensitive hashing (LSH), ala Shazam, etc. If you look at the page [here](https://audiofingerprint.openwpm.com/ https://audiofingerprint.openwpm.com/), you'll see they are merely looking at the audio processing capabilities for your browser's, which is tied to your hardware microphone's / browser version's specs. Things like number of channels, FFT size, etc. In summary, this is only invasive so far as knowing your laptop model or browser version, not actual recorded voice (you have to call `getUserMedia()` for that IIRC). For more information on acoustic fingerprinting, see [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint) and [here](http://willdrevo.com/fingerprinting-and-audio-recognition-with-python/ http://willdrevo.com/fingerprinting-and-audio-recognition-wi...).
- StavrosK 10y ago
  So "audio capability fingerprinting", which isn't anywhere near as frightening and clickbaity.

30 points by Sami_Lehtinen 10y ago

Zikes 10y ago

The original study: http://randomwalker.info/publications/OpenWPM_1_million_site_tracking_measurement.pdf http://randomwalker.info/publications/OpenWPM_1_million_site... The relevant section of the study is "6.4 AudioContext Fingerprinting", on page 15. Notably, they link to an online tool they developed that demonstrates this fingerprinting technique [1] [1] https://audiofingerprint.openwpm.com/ https://audiofingerprint.openwpm.com/

ungzd 10y ago

Article is just recompilation of articles from other news sites, there is no explanation how it works and there is link to "acoustic fingerprint" article on Wikipedia which is about entirely different thing.

hammock 10y ago
Submission be revised to original source: http://www.zdnet.com/article/think-youre-not-being-tracked-now-websites-turn-to-audio-fingerprinting-to-follow-you/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/think-youre-not-being-tracked-n...
- dang 10y ago
  The original source was posted and discussed extensively at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11729438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11729438.

cyphar 10y ago

I'm interested to see how long it takes the Tor Browser Bundle to get a fix for this attack.

muzakthings 10y ago

This is somewhat of a misnomer. For those of you who came here expecting acoustic fingerprinting, realize this is a different class of algorithms related to locality sensitive hashing (LSH), ala Shazam, etc. If you look at the page [here](https://audiofingerprint.openwpm.com/ https://audiofingerprint.openwpm.com/), you'll see they are merely looking at the audio processing capabilities for your browser's, which is tied to your hardware microphone's / browser version's specs. Things like number of channels, FFT size, etc. In summary, this is only invasive so far as knowing your laptop model or browser version, not actual recorded voice (you have to call `getUserMedia()` for that IIRC). For more information on acoustic fingerprinting, see [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint) and [here](http://willdrevo.com/fingerprinting-and-audio-recognition-with-python/ http://willdrevo.com/fingerprinting-and-audio-recognition-wi...).

StavrosK 10y ago
So "audio capability fingerprinting", which isn't anywhere near as frightening and clickbaity.