Countering Browser Fingerprinting Techniques: Constructing a Fake Profile with Google Chrome

While Web browsers are fundamental components in the Internet nowadays, the widespread availability of several techniques that can be used to detect the individual browser connected to a server raises privacy issues that need to be adequately addressed. Browser fingerprinting uses a combination of attributes, whose values are silently obtained during normal navigation, to identify, with high likelihood, a browser and, consequently, who is controlling such browser. Although providing contrived or random values for specific single attributes or attribute sets can be at least partly successful in interfering with the operation of fingerprinting, such approach may also have adverse effects. The objective of this work is to suggest an alternative: supplying coherent data designed in such a way as to mimick as closely as possible a different browser. A proof-of-concept implementation as an extension for the Chrome browser is presented and discussed.