Distinctive user identifiers discovered in web browsers

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» 19 May 2010

Distinctive user identifiers discovered in web browsers

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) broadcasted their most up-to-date security study on Monday this week. It was found out with this newly published research that there are certain digital fingerprints being left lingering online whenever people browse through the different web pages. And, these may be utilized against each of the individual users in such a way that these can be used in exclusively recognizing each of them with the fingerprints that are unconsciously imprinted by the web browsers.

It is a lot safer to be unique

Experts from the Electronic Frontier Foundation made use of a website that can evaluate the settings of the web browsers utilized by the 1 million users visiting the test page. And, upon reviewing the figures, it was concluded that about 84 percent of the users utilize the browser configuration that may be considered as unique.

Visiting the website using the Mozilla Firefox browser with a distinctive configuration will give the user a specific note saying that the fingerprint is most probably exclusive if contrasted with about 830,000 or so web users.

Slight modification in settings can render different products

There was no significant alteration in the test results if the JavaScript and Java with the NoScript plug-in are both turned off on one of the computers being examined. On the other hand, activating the NoScript plug-in showed an evident raise in the quantity of web browsers having similar fingerprints.

According to EFF, the logs that were created on this research were kept confidential. However, it cannot be avoided if the agency or the other the websites around the world decide to create a database of the digital fingerprints of all the users browsing through their web pages.

Understanding the new knowledge appears to be essential

As said by Peter Eckersley, the Electronic Frontier Foundation Technologist, there is quite a large number of corporations asserting that they have already created the perfect tool in which browser fingerprinting may be used so as to watch the web activities of the many users and also to recognize the individuals visiting a certain site.

It can be genuinely learned from this research the significance of knowing today’s web issues. It is clearly stated that the recently discovered process is considered as a very potent tracking mechanism.

The “panopticlick” website of EFF scrutinizes the user agents, the HTTP_ACCEPT Headers, and the different browser features. These are being studied in an attempt to gauge the number of users browsing the website, which appear to have similar web browser configurations. Lastly, proper security methods may be given to the users so that they can avoid having their distinct features tracked by vicious criminals.

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