[tor-bugs] #9501 [TorBrowserButton]: Reduce TorBrowser's fingerprint by making the user agent string blend into the crowd

Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki blackhole at torproject.org
Fri Aug 16 19:05:46 UTC 2013


#9501: Reduce TorBrowser's fingerprint by making the user agent string blend into
the crowd
------------------------------+---------------------------------------------
 Reporter:  DC                |          Owner:  mikeperry       
     Type:  enhancement       |         Status:  new             
 Priority:  normal            |      Milestone:                  
Component:  TorBrowserButton  |        Version:  Tor: unspecified
 Keywords:                    |         Parent:                  
   Points:                    |   Actualpoints:                  
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 I have a suggestion. In my humble opinion, I think it's brilliant:

 To reduce TorBrowser's fingerprint, change the UA string to match
 whichever Firefox UA string is most frequently seen in the wild. You could
 get that information from the EFF's Panopticlick project.

 So basically, take the ~ 3 million browser fingerprints in Panopticlick.
 Grab UA's that match "Firefox" and pick whichever one is most common. The
 result probably looks somewhat like this:

 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:22.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/22.0

 Use that exactly as TorBrowser's UA string... Basically, lie. Pick the UA
 string that will most make TorBrowser blend into the crowd and produce the
 least unique fingerprint.

 The reason I say to search for "Firefox" instead of just picking the most
 popular string (probably some version of Chrome) is that a Firefox browser
 pretending to be Chrome might stand out and inadvertently have a very
 unique fingerprint.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/9501>
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki <https://trac.torproject.org/>
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