Software diversity to mitigate browser fingerprinting, B. Baudry (INRIA) / P. Laperdrix (INSA/INRIA)
Channel: Paris Open Source Summit
Date: 26/11/2014

Software diversity is the source of an essential privacy issue: the massive quantities of available plugins, fonts, customization options in browsers, make all browsers slightly different and thus users are uniquely identifiable through their browser fingerprint. We claim that software diversity also provides a great pool of modules to constantly change an execution platform and modify the user's fingerprint. We propose Blink, an open source tool that automatically synthesizes parts of a user's platform that are the most distinguishable in a fingerprint, and modify them over time. We can introduce random changes on the operating system, the browser, the lists of fonts and plugins. At a time where container technologies are gaining momentum, we believe that it is possible to isolate the web browser in its isolated environment in order to seamlessly evolve the fingerprint with almost no overhead for users.

http://www.openworldforum.paris/fr/tracks/privacy#talk_374