JShelter: Give Me My Browser Back

Libor Polčák, Marek Saloň, Giorgio Maone, Radek Hranický, Michael McMahon

2023

Abstract

The web is used daily by billions. Even so, users are not protected from many threats by default. This paper builds on previous web privacy and security research and introduces JShelter, a webextension that fights to return the browser to users. Moreover, we introduce a library helping with common webextension development tasks and fixing loopholes. JShelter focuses on fingerprinting prevention, limitations of rich web APIs, prevention of attacks connected to timing, and learning information about the device, the browser, the user, and the surrounding physical environment and location. During the research of sensor APIs, we discovered a loophole in the sensor timestamps that lets any page observe the device boot time if sensor APIs are enabled in Chromium-based browsers. JShelter provides a fingerprinting report and other feedback that can be used by future web privacy research. Thousands of users around the world use the webextension every day.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Polčák L., Saloň M., Maone G., Hranický R. and McMahon M. (2023). JShelter: Give Me My Browser Back. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT; ISBN 978-989-758-666-8, SciTePress, pages 287-294. DOI: 10.5220/0011965600003555

in Bibtex Style

@conference{secrypt23,
author={Libor Polčák and Marek Saloň and Giorgio Maone and Radek Hranický and Michael McMahon},
title={JShelter: Give Me My Browser Back},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT},
year={2023},
pages={287-294},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0011965600003555},
isbn={978-989-758-666-8},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT
TI - JShelter: Give Me My Browser Back
SN - 978-989-758-666-8
AU - Polčák L.
AU - Saloň M.
AU - Maone G.
AU - Hranický R.
AU - McMahon M.
PY - 2023
SP - 287
EP - 294
DO - 10.5220/0011965600003555
PB - SciTePress