Fingerprinting Methods Identify Users Across Different Browsers On the Same PC (bleepingcomputer.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: A team of researchers from universities across the U.S. has identified different fingerprinting techniques that can track users when they use different browsers installed on the same machine. Named "cross-browser fingerprinting" (CBF), this practice relies on new technologies added to web browsers in recent years, some of which had been previously considered unreliable for cross-browser tracking and only used for single browser fingerprinting. These new techniques rely on making browsers carry out operations that use the underlying hardware components to process the desired data. For example, making a browser apply an image to the side of a 3D cube in WebGL provides a similar response in hardware parameters for all browsers. This is because the GPU card is the one carrying out this operation and not the browser software. According to the three-man research team led by Assistant Professor Yinzhi Cao from the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Lehigh University, the following browser features could be (ab)used for cross-browser fingerprinting operations: [Screen Resolution, Number of CPU Virtual Cores, AudioContext, List of Fonts, Line, Curve, and Anti-Aliasing, Vertex Shader, Fragment Shader, Transparency via Alpha Channel, Installed Writing Scripts (Languages), Modeling and Multiple Models, Lighting and Shadow Mapping, Camera and Clipping Planes.] Researchers used all these techniques together to test how many users they would be able to pin to the same computer. For tests, researchers used browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Edge, IE, Opera, Safari, Maxthon, UC Browser, and Coconut. Results showed that CBF techniques were able to correctly identify 99.24% of all test users. Previous research methods achieved only a 90.84% result.

Comments

You're far too generous

[bsdasym]

The game site does not need to know what your capabilities are. If you try to run it, and it doesn't work, you don't try again. It doesn't need to know *any* of the fonts or even font-families you have installed, it just needs to do what the web has always done; Present a list of fonts the site designer would like the browser to use, if they are available and the user allows it. No site needs to know even the simple small/med/large screen size, as that can all be (and usually is) handled entirely within the browser via CSS.

Give them even less info than you propose and it'll still be too much, generally speaking.

Re:VirtualBox

[techno-vampire]

Using multiple VMs with different distros won't help a bit here, because when you come right down to it, they're all using the same hardware, and that's what this is exploiting. Now, if you had multiple graphics cards and let different distros use different cards, that might throw them off.