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 excited to improve the extension further. We will focus on the following main goals:
1. Investigate fingerprinting scripts and prepare wrappers
Review the previously identified APIs suitable for fingerprinting. Select APIs suitable for JShelter and add wrappers for these APIs. This work has already started, see issue #66. Additionally, we want to focus on identification of methods used for fingeprinting such as those identified by Iqbal et al., see https://uiowa-irl.github.io/FP-Inspector/
2. Prevent unique identification of a device
It is hard, if not impossible, to both prevent fingerprinting and still provide customized environment for the user. Hence, we want to identify fingerprinting attempts by counting the number of different APIs employed by a page, especially APIs that are not frequently used for benign purposes. When a fingerprinting attempt is identified, we want to (1) inform the user, (2) prevent uploading of the fingerprint to the server, (3) prevent storing the fingerprint for later usage.
3. Code ported from Chrome Zero
In version 0.3, we integrated features of Chrome Zero 7 as it is no longer maintained. By integrating the functionality to JShelter, we want to keep the counter-meassures available in a maintained extension. However, we do not have sufficient tests for the functionality.
4. Evaluation and porting of code from Brave
Brave browser currently implements anti-fingerprinting techniques that aim at providing little lies about the browser environment. We want to evaluate the messures and select techniques that are suitable for JShelter.
5. Fixing known bugs
We want to focus on the proposed changes and found bugs that are reported in the GitHub bug tracker.
- We already closed issues #53, #62, and #72 as a part of this project. The fixes are already available as a part of the 0.4 subversions.
- We want to also deal with issues #56 and #71 that are crucial for the success of the extension.
- We will focus on other identified bugs in the wrappers or developped techniques.
6. Cooperation with the Privacy Shield project
We are also excited to announce that we found other partners that are willing to work on our code base through the NGI0 PET Fund, Privacy Shield project run by Free Software Foundation. Expect inclusion of code that will help to defend your freedoms and provide anti-malware protections. This cooperation should also improve the GUI of the extension and create explenatory web pages explaining the functionality and its risks. It is possible that the project will be rebranded as a result of the cooperation.