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The Underpants Project

lab.cubiq.org

31–40 of 87 posts

Re: The Underpants Project

#31

You can view source to see what they're using to generate the fingerprint: screenSize, devicePixelRatio, timezone, mimeTypes, plugins, httpAcceptHeaders, fonts. It's interesting that these are enough to generate a moderately unique fingerprint. I'm sure my fonts list is unique, so that's probably enough to ID me right there. However, not every computer I use has the same fonts installed, nor the same screen dimension…

I would say how unique the fingerprint really is is actually an important issue, I wonder how much traffic / time does it take before collisions start to occur. In the current setting it would probably suffice if the fingerprint generated one of just 100 or 500 values, the traffic is probably rather low and you visit the page for maybe few minutes and you probably won't go back to it in 3 days or even in 1 hour just to check whether some other guy didn't overwrite your secret word.

Regardless, it's a very interesting idea, and also picturing how difficult and counter-intuitive security can be if you do not study such issues, as an API designer I would surely have a hard time foreseeing that exposing the screen size or fonts list can turn out to be a security issues for the users.

Re: The Underpants Project

#32

I really question the name of this. Underpants Project? I just don't get it. It doesn't really fit with the point you're trying to make, IMO.

Underpants could be a synonym for underwear, in which case it could make sense: you'd like to keep you fingerprint private on the web, and your underwear private in real life.

Re: The Underpants Project

#33

I really question the name of this. Underpants Project? I just don't get it. It doesn't really fit with the point you're trying to make, IMO.

1st step create tracking software. 2nd step 3rd step profit

"The Underpant Gnomes"[1] were honestly the very first thing that came to my mind when I read the name.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomes_%28South_Park%29

Re: The Underpants Project

#34

Simply resizing my browser window before pasting the second url seems to thwart this (But I don't have flash installed). Without flash, it falls firmly into the "kinda-works sometimes if everything goes perfect" camp. So its another demonstration of flash being ridiculously insecure. These guys did it better, even defeating tor to reveal the origin IP. http://dl.packetstormsecurity.net/0610-advisories/Practical_...

Interesting, I had Chrome Flash Block enabled but it did not seem to thwart this.

Re: The Underpants Project

#35
post #5

I think it doesn't work. After typing "meow" and hitting enter. The copy paster url had this to say about me "It seems you didn't save the word. Go to lab.cubiq.org/underpants first." The unique fingerprint is also different. "93615388f7f54cd79d2f806ac3795c182217aa9b" somehow became "f37ec3fdd05c27c13cbb7fcdef95cc004297f62d" after copy-pasting. Other than that technical glitch for me (Linux, Chrome latest unstable ve…

I entered meow too. It also forget my word and fingerprint.

Re: The Underpants Project

#36

Simply resizing my browser window before pasting the second url seems to thwart this (But I don't have flash installed). Without flash, it falls firmly into the "kinda-works sometimes if everything goes perfect" camp. So its another demonstration of flash being ridiculously insecure. These guys did it better, even defeating tor to reveal the origin IP. http://dl.packetstormsecurity.net/0610-advisories/Practical_...

If someone's foolish enough to run javascript and flash on Tor, of course it's trivially easy to defeat it!

Re: The Underpants Project

#37
post #18

Can anyone explain what use-case this technique enables that is not served by cookie tracking? Or is the point that disabling cookies is not sufficient to avoid being tracked? Everyone has cookies enabled (or many sites don't work), so if that's all it is, nbd..

Cookies don't cross site boundaries - e.g., cnn.com can't read a cookie set by foxnews.com.

Just to emphasize that this is meant to demonstrate privacy risks, not to be taken as a feature suggestion...

Re: The Underpants Project

#39
"Your word has been saved! Now point your browser to any of the following addresses (copy-n-paste) and watch the magic."

Followed by, "It seems you didn't save the word." on the two connecting websites.

Safari 5.1.5, OS X 10.6.8, no add-ons installed. I do, however, have Flash configured to not allow any websites access to local storage unless I specifically say so.

Re: The Underpants Project

#40
post #2

With NoScript, it does not provide a tracking ID. Which shows yet another reason to browse with NoScript.

Not necessarily, they fingerprint you using the info the browser gives to them. This site for example uses JS to do the fingerprinting, but it could be just as easily (perhaps less scalable) to do the fingerprinting serverside.

TL;DR serverside code can fingerprint you

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