4 ms·
Using the User-Agent in combination with the Accept-Language header is probably enough to finger-print specific users that have their traffic exiting a VPN. As
by junto 13y ago
Using the User-Agent in combination with the Accept-Language header is probably enough to finger-print specific users that have their traffic exiting a VPN.
Assuming the NSA are monitoring the traffic exiting VPN exit points, one minor identity leak by a user (i.e. accessing a website that leaks their identity such as their Facebook profile) would allow the NSA to back-track against any stored traffic using those exact headers.
e.g. NSA db search:
-- Search for 'Junto' traffic exiting VyprVPN London
SELECT [Url],[Timestamp],[Headers],[Ip],[Body],[Response] FROM
HttpTrafficLog
WHERE
UserAgent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36
(KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/29.0.1547.66 Safari/537.36'
AND
AcceptLanguage = 'en-GB,en;q=0.8,de-DE;q=0.6,de;q=0.4,
zh-CN;q=0.2,zh;q=0.2,en-US;q=0.2'
The user agent leaks far too much in my opinion, and no, I do not have British-German-Chinese heritage.
- Nick_C 13y agoI agree it leaks far too much, especially for niche operating systems like Linux. For Firefox, I use the "Modify Headers" add-on to remove the extra info, so UserAgent=Mozilla/Firefox and AcceptLanguage=en. http://www.garethhunt.com/modifyheaders http://www.garethhunt.com/modifyheaders