(resending to tor-dev because the original message didn't go through)
On 03/16/2014 11:52 PM, Yan Zhu wrote:
On 03/16/2014 07:59 PM, Gunes Acar wrote:
Dear All,
My name is Gunes Acar, a 2nd year PhD student at Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography (COSIC) group of University of Leuven.
I work with Prof. Claudia Diaz and study online tracking and browser fingerprinting. I'd like to work on "Panopticlick" (https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html.en#panopticlick) summer project and other fingerprinting related issues which I tried to outline below:
Hi Gunes,
I think all of these projects below would primarily be with EFF, not Tor directly. Peter and/or I would be your point of contact; I'm not familiar enough with Panopticlick at this time to give you much feedback on the ideas below, so I cc'ed Peter.
- Collaborate with Peter@EFF to port/open-source Panopticlick:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/6119#comment:4 a) implement necessary modifications - e.g. we won't be having cookies or real IP addresses to match returning visitors. b) consider security implications of storing fingerprints (e.g. what happens if someone gets access to fingerprint database?)
Peter, what's the blocker on this? It sounds like Tor folks really want it to happen soon, so I'm happy to take the lead on helping get this open-sourced from the EFF side.
- Add machine-readability support outlined in Tor Automation
proposals: https://people.torproject.org/~boklm/automation/tor-automation-proposals.htm... a) which one(s) should we implement? JSON, YAML, XML?
No input here.
- Survey the literature for fingerprinting attacks published since
Panopticlick. Implement those that may apply to TBB: a) Canvas & WebGL fingerprinting (Mowery et al.) - make sure the patch at #6253 works b) JS engine fingerprinting (Mulazzani et al.) c) CSS & rendering engine fingerprinting, (Unger et al.)
This sounds greatly useful. Another good place to look is Mozilla's bug tracker (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/).
- Check with realworld fingerprinting scripts to see if they collect
anything that is not considered before. Check if TBB's FP countermeasures work against them. (We can use data from FPDetective study to find sites with fingerprinting scripts)
Same as above.
- Backport new "attacks" found in 3 & 4 to EFF's Panopticlick in case
they consider an update.
Yes, I'm happy to get those updates into EFF's instance.
- Convert fixed FP-related bugs into regression tests.
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?keywords=~tbb-fingerprinting&...
- Build test cases to check the severity of fingerprinting related
open tickets, e.g.: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/8770 https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/10299
Work on potential fingerprinting bugs that ESR31 may bring.
ESR transitions seem to create a lot of FP-related issues that need
to be checked manually (e.g. #9608). Consider developing a tool that iterates over the host objects of two browsers to compare them automatically (e.g. to pinpoint new objects, new methods, updated default values, etc.). Similar to "diff tool" mentioned here: https://people.torproject.org/~boklm/automation/tor-automation-proposals.htm...
- Evaluate the font-limits of TBB by checking the average # of fonts
Top 1 Million sites use. We can either collect fresh data with FPDetective or use the existing (~1 year old) data.
All of the above sounds fine.
Assuming that we can get Panopticlick open-sourced, I'm more than happy to help you with any of these subprojects.
-Yan (EFF Staff Technologist / HTTPS Everywhere maintainer)