An iterative technique to identify browser fingerprinting scripts

Abstract: Browser fingerprinting is a stateless identification technique based on browser properties. Together, they form an identifier that can be collected without users' notice and has been studied to be unique and stable. As this technique relies on browser properties that serve legitimate purposes, the detection of this technique is challenging. While several studies propose classification techniques, none of these are publicly available, making them difficult to reproduce. This paper proposes a new browser fingerprinting detection technique. Based on an incremental process, it relies on both automatic and manual decisions to be both reliable and fast. The automatic step matches API calls similarities between scripts while the manual step is required to classify a script with different calls. We publicly share our algorithm and implementation to improve the general knowledge on the subject.