[flagged]
[deleted]
Bypassing Safari 17's advanced audio fingerprinting protection
31–40 of 266 posts
Re: Bypassing Safari 17's advanced audio fingerprinting protection
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has nothing to do with the microphone...
Then where are these audio samples coming from?
The browser's Audio API.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_A...
Re: Bypassing Safari 17's advanced audio fingerprinting protection
#33Can anyone explain why the results are different to begin with? E.g. why is this audio fingerprinting even possible in the first place?
The essence seems to be that the web audio API has a lot of algorithms that do a lot of math, and every browser has a slightly different implementation, and the exact results depend on the operating system and cpu too. So if you use the web audio API to generate a small signal all browsers will generate something that's really close, but the tiny differences can be used to help tell them apart.
Re: Bypassing Safari 17's advanced audio fingerprinting protection
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is using differences in the audio processing pipeline of the browser, they just use some input sound which could be taken from a file. The fingerprint is the slightly different output signal when applying filters to the input signal.
How is it possible that this produces enough variations to be usable without sampling some sort of audio source? The entire pipeline is digital, there is not any room for interference.
It’s doing signal processing using floats, that can lead to differences in the result even if the implemented algorithm is identical. Float addition is not commutative so reordering some calculations, either in different implementations or with different compiler options, can lead to slightly different results. This just detects browser version and maybe OS/Architecture, the same browser binary should still give the same results between different devices with same hardware.
Re: Bypassing Safari 17's advanced audio fingerprinting protection
#35Did I read this correctly and audio fingerprinting is mainly about identifiying the used browser version and OS or laptop, but it cant identify end-users in a stable way?
Yeah, it doesn't tell a website who you are. Instead, it allows them to recognize you again when you come back to visit again, even if you clear cookies.
This is particularly a problem with big advertiser networks because they can track you across many sites you visit, even if you disable third-party cookies.
It has positive uses too, like preventing click fraud and concert ticket arbitrage.
Re: Bypassing Safari 17's advanced audio fingerprinting protection
#36Does disabling web audio beat this fingerprinting?
Re: Bypassing Safari 17's advanced audio fingerprinting protection
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is using differences in the audio processing pipeline of the browser, they just use some input sound which could be taken from a file. The fingerprint is the slightly different output signal when applying filters to the input signal.
How is it possible that this produces enough variations to be usable without sampling some sort of audio source? The entire pipeline is digital, there is not any room for interference.
They just generate a sine wave and do some processing on it. The results are very similar but because the processing depends on functions like fast fourier transform, plus the exact algorithm in the browser code, tiny differences emerge.
Re: Bypassing Safari 17's advanced audio fingerprinting protection
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that is correct, but it still seems like an amount of leakage that could be further correlated with other another trick. There was previously a site which could indicate how globally unique your environment was (some combination of screen size, user-agent, fonts?, etc). Locking down to a specific hardware+browser configuration probably does a lot to remove anonymity.
You may be thinking of https://www.amiunique.org/fingerprint
Not the one I used, but this one actually looks better.
Just being Linux + Firefox is terrible for blending into the herd. Let alone everything else that leaks (having a desktop + GPU + good monitor basically destroys all remaining hope).
Re: Bypassing Safari 17's advanced audio fingerprinting protection
#39Why am I supposed to want any website I visit to be able to render audio offline anyway?
Re: Bypassing Safari 17's advanced audio fingerprinting protection
#40Does this technique fingerprint based on hardware/driver/OS differences with audio processing, or just the browser software? I believe there are (or were, hopefully) similar techniques using that exposed differences between the underlying graphics devices.
This is similar. Audio algorithms often call OS functions and make use of CPU optimizations. One example they mentioned is the fast-fourier transform (FFT). All OS's include a version of that function but it tends to be optimized over time, and tends to behave differently on different CPUs depending on what SIMD instructions are available.