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Tor Fingerprinting: Tor Browser Can Mitigate Browser Fingerprinting?

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes on Data Engineering and Communications Technologies ((LNDECT,volume 7))

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Abstract

The onion router (Tor) is currently the most powerful and prominent tool to achieve online privacy on the Internet. As a browser, Tor can protect web users by not revealing the source or destination IP address, and it also prevents web tracking with HTTP cookies. Tor browser has been updated continuously to resist de-anonymizing attacks by restricting the browser’s functions, e.g., excluding all plugins such as Flash player. On March 2016, Jose Norte posted the article as “Advanced Tor Browser Fingerprinting” in his blog [37]. It suggested that browser fingerprinting can track Tor browser. In this paper, we examined how secure Tor browser version 5.5 is against browser fingerprinting. Our study concludes that Tor user accesses can be distinguished: 14.28% of Tor browser version 5.5 can be identified within two weeks at our experimental sites, although 70.0% of the older versions can. In this paper, we analyze the current features of Tor browser against browser fingerprinting and also show capabilities to track Tor browser accesses.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 26330162. We are deeply grateful to Y. Nishikura for this work.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Science and Engineering, Meiji University, Higashimita 1-1-1, Tama, Kawasaki, Japan

    Takamichi Saito, Kazushi Takahashi, Koki Yasuda, Kazuhisa Tanabe, Masayuki Taneoka & Ryohei Hosoya

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  1. Takamichi Saito
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  2. Kazushi Takahashi
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  3. Koki Yasuda
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  4. Kazuhisa Tanabe
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  5. Masayuki Taneoka
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  6. Ryohei Hosoya
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Takamichi Saito .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Faculty of Information Engineering, Fukuoka Institute of Technology, Fukuoka, Japan

    Leonard Barolli

  2. Rissho University, Tokyo, Japan

    Tomoya Enokido

  3. Hosei University, Tokyo, Japan

    Makoto Takizawa

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Saito, T., Takahashi, K., Yasuda, K., Tanabe, K., Taneoka, M., Hosoya, R. (2018). Tor Fingerprinting: Tor Browser Can Mitigate Browser Fingerprinting?. In: Barolli, L., Enokido, T., Takizawa, M. (eds) Advances in Network-Based Information Systems. NBiS 2017. Lecture Notes on Data Engineering and Communications Technologies, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65521-5_44

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65521-5_44

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-65520-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-65521-5

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