3 ms·

For me the most interesting part is where they break down how many bits of information is leaked by the various signals. Do browsers ever try to fuzz any of th

For me the most interesting part is where they break down how many bits of information is leaked by the various signals. Do browsers ever try to fuzz any of these values? For example lying about what GPU I'm using, or occasionally swapping between equivalent timezones?

KirillPanov 5y ago
> Do browsers ever try to fuzz any of these values? Brave does, and it is absolutely the right approach to fingerprinting. They call it "farbling" rather than "fuzzing": https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/8787 https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/8787 The alternative is what Firefox does (halfheartedly), which is to try to make users look similar to each other. It really bothers me that Firefox is so stuck on this approach -- in every other way I prefer Firefox over Brave and I really do not want to switch just for this one feature. But Firefox's halfway implementation of "try to make everybody look similar" is doomed: a serious effort would turn Firefox into TorBrowser-with-javascript-disabled or worse, which is never going to work. To Firefox's credit, one area where Brave is having problems with this is font fingerprinting, because they don't control their own rendering engine (it's Chromium). So Firefox could "do Brave-style antifingerprinting" better than Brave does, if they got serious about it: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/816 https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/816
olliej 5y ago
GPUs specifically are hard to mask. Because gpus are terrible ( ;D ) and you have to expose a lot of details for webgl apps to work correctly (despite my efforts to limit feature set in the distant past), and hiding or adding details to that could break them so you have to assume that any site that's interested can know exactly what GPU you have.
- PeterisP 5y ago
  IMHO for most users it would make all sense to just break webgl apps except if you explicitly whitelist a particular site where you really want to use a webgl app there. If some random blog or webstore pretends to be a webgl app for tracking purposes, the browser should just auto-deny everything.
  - olliej 5y ago
    The original safari webgl implementation did just that, and the dialog was useless as you had no way of knowing if a site was trustworthy.
    - PeterisP 5y ago
      It's not useless because it's not about trustworthiness but rather about expected functionality. I may consider google.com and amazon.com as trustworthy in general, but the user does not want anything from these sites that needs WebGL functionality, so if they try to enable WebGL, that doesn't serve a user need and needs to be denied; and shadyjoessuperfun3dgame.com.aaaaaaaaa.ru might be less trustworthy, but if someone wants to play that superfun3dgame and it needs webgl, they might reasonably enable webgl and the related tracking opportunities for that site alone - but not 99% of the rest of the web. It's more about the general paradigm of recognizing that yes, there are some web apps that would need extensive functionality that might be abused (e.g. advanced copy/pasting features for an online document editing tool, or the ability to connect to USB devices, or camera/microphone functionality, etc), but also that most web browsing does not involve things that user desires to be a web app, and all those sites should be limited to a quite narrow sandbox of functionality. All these fancy features with privacy risk that are needed for some advanced web app replacing desktop features are fine and useful, but they should be exceptions on a per-site basis, not enabled for the whole browser so that they can get used by random blog that includes a standard ad-network javascript file.
glenneroo 5y ago
I just wish they would also list mitigations for each of the leakages.

KirillPanov 5y ago

> Do browsers ever try to fuzz any of these values? Brave does, and it is absolutely the right approach to fingerprinting. They call it "farbling" rather than "fuzzing": https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/8787 https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/8787 The alternative is what Firefox does (halfheartedly), which is to try to make users look similar to each other. It really bothers me that Firefox is so stuck on this approach -- in every other way I prefer Firefox over Brave and I really do not want to switch just for this one feature. But Firefox's halfway implementation of "try to make everybody look similar" is doomed: a serious effort would turn Firefox into TorBrowser-with-javascript-disabled or worse, which is never going to work. To Firefox's credit, one area where Brave is having problems with this is font fingerprinting, because they don't control their own rendering engine (it's Chromium). So Firefox could "do Brave-style antifingerprinting" better than Brave does, if they got serious about it: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/816 https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/816

olliej 5y ago

GPUs specifically are hard to mask. Because gpus are terrible ( ;D ) and you have to expose a lot of details for webgl apps to work correctly (despite my efforts to limit feature set in the distant past), and hiding or adding details to that could break them so you have to assume that any site that's interested can know exactly what GPU you have.

PeterisP 5y ago
IMHO for most users it would make all sense to just break webgl apps except if you explicitly whitelist a particular site where you really want to use a webgl app there. If some random blog or webstore pretends to be a webgl app for tracking purposes, the browser should just auto-deny everything.
- olliej 5y ago
  The original safari webgl implementation did just that, and the dialog was useless as you had no way of knowing if a site was trustworthy.
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    It's not useless because it's not about trustworthiness but rather about expected functionality. I may consider google.com and amazon.com as trustworthy in general, but the user does not want anything from these sites that needs WebGL functionality, so if they try to enable WebGL, that doesn't serve a user need and needs to be denied; and shadyjoessuperfun3dgame.com.aaaaaaaaa.ru might be less trustworthy, but if someone wants to play that superfun3dgame and it needs webgl, they might reasonably enable webgl and the related tracking opportunities for that site alone - but not 99% of the rest of the web. It's more about the general paradigm of recognizing that yes, there are some web apps that would need extensive functionality that might be abused (e.g. advanced copy/pasting features for an online document editing tool, or the ability to connect to USB devices, or camera/microphone functionality, etc), but also that most web browsing does not involve things that user desires to be a web app, and all those sites should be limited to a quite narrow sandbox of functionality. All these fancy features with privacy risk that are needed for some advanced web app replacing desktop features are fine and useful, but they should be exceptions on a per-site basis, not enabled for the whole browser so that they can get used by random blog that includes a standard ad-network javascript file.

glenneroo 5y ago

I just wish they would also list mitigations for each of the leakages.