The JavaScript Restrictor (JSR) project (supported by NGI0 PET Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 825310) is heading towards its end, and we summarize what …

Today devices contain various sensors for reading information about the device's position, state, and environment. Such equipment is typical for mobile devices like cellphones, tablets, or laptops that often include sensors for obtaining geolocation or device orientation data. Another example is a smartwatch that could monitor the heartbeat rate of …

We recently submitted a position paper about JShelter for CNIL Privacy Research Day 2022 and posted the paper on arXive. If you are interested in the project or if you are already using JShelter, we recommend reading the paper as it explains the project, its historical decisions, the thread model …

This project started as JavaScript Restrictor at Brno University of Technology. As announced in a previous post, we got funding from NLNet NGI0 PET Fund. Furthermore, NLNet allowed us to cooperate with another NGI0 PET Fund project - JShelter project (formerly known as JavaScript Shield project) run by Free Software Foundation …

We want to identify fingerprinting attempts by counting the number of different APIs employed by a page, especially those not frequently used for benign purposes. This blog post introduces a new fingerprinting protection mechanism - FingerPrint Detector (FPD) available in JShelter 0.6. This tool allows users to gain more control …

This post introduces browser fingerprinting and anti-fingerprinting mechanisms. We explain what JShelter implements and explain the strengths and downsides of the anti-fingerprinting mechanisms. In short, browser fingerprinting is a stateless tracking method vastly prevalent on the internet in recent years. Similarly to a human fingerprint, browser fingerprinting tries to find …

A previous blogpost introduced a methodology to measure the usage of JavaScript APIs on the web by crawling the web. The starting point of our web crawling research is the work of Peter Snyder. Most importantly, we wanted to compare the differences in JS API usage between browsers with and …

Browser fingerprinting is a more and more popular technique used to identify browsers. The fingerprint is computed based on the results of JavaScript calls, the content of HTTP headers, hardware characteristics, underlying operating system and other software information. Consequently, browser fingerprints are used for cross-domain tracking. However, users cannot clear …

We recently found a blog post about ThreatMetrix Inc. (a part of LexisNexis) scanning locally open ports for about 30,000 web sites, including eBay. The figure below shows that a browser tries to connect to ports commonly used for remote access to the computer (e.g., RDesktop, VNC, TeamViewer …

The world wide web is a complex environment. Web pages can access many APIs ranging from text formatting to access to nearby Bluetooth devices. While many APIs are used for legitimate purposes, some are misused to track and identify their users without their knowledge. In this paper, we propose a …

We are very happy to announce that the JavaScript Restrictor received support from NGI0 PET Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 825310. We are very …