چكيده به لاتين
Nowadays, the web technology has become an inseparable part of the daily life and it is developing continuously. This technology, along with the benefits including various and often free services, it is accompanied by non-negligible disadvantages, that compromises privacy of web users by the trackers. User tracking is used to identify the visited websites for analyzing user interests. Results of these analyzes can be ultimately used by social analysts and profitable advertising industries. This study proposes a countermeasure against fingerprinting to preserve web users privacy and security. To achieve this goal, offering various values for some of the browser features and HTTP headers a Google Chrome Extension is designed which prevents identification of real fingerprint of the user’s platform. Values provided for the features are gathered from real user platforms and are included in the extension after analyzing and selecting high-repeat values (more common among users). The purpose of this extension is primarily not to be recognized with the actual fingerprint of the platform, and secondarily to become similar to other platforms, which is, the reason why high-repeat values for the features are used. These values prevent the fingerprint from being unique and makes it difficult for the trackers to identify the exact platform and distinguish it from similar fingerprints. Evaluating the efficiency of the extension, two scenarios have been designed. In the first scenario, by comparing the fingerprints generated by the three websites https://fingerprint.pet-portal.eu/, https://clientjs.org / and http://bluecava.com/ when the anonymity extension is used against the actual fingerprint of the platform, ability of the extension in anonymizing the platform has been evaluated. In the second scenario, uniqueness rate of the feature values offered by the extension is evaluated using the two websites https://panopticlick.eff.org/ and https://amiunique.org. As a result of both evaluations, Chrome's anonymizing extension successfully fulfilled both goals.
Keywords: Fingerprinting, Privacy, User Tracking, Web Security
