To Extend or not to Extend: on the Uniqueness of Browser Extensions and Web Logins
Gabor Gyorgy Gulyas, Doliere Francis Some, Nataliia Bielova, Claude, Castelluccia

TL;DR
This study demonstrates that browser extensions and web logins significantly contribute to user fingerprinting, enabling rapid and accurate user identification, which raises privacy concerns and suggests the need for effective countermeasures.
Contribution
First large-scale behavioral uniqueness analysis based on browser extensions and web logins, revealing their impact on user fingerprinting and privacy risks.
Findings
54.86% of users with detectable extensions are unique
19.53% of users with logins are unique
89.23% of users with extensions and logins are unique
Abstract
Recent works showed that websites can detect browser extensions that users install and websites they are logged into. This poses significant privacy risks, since extensions and Web logins that reflect user's behavior, can be used to uniquely identify users on the Web. This paper reports on the first large-scale behavioral uniqueness study based on 16,393 users who visited our website. We test and detect the presence of 16,743 Chrome extensions, covering 28% of all free Chrome extensions. We also detect whether the user is connected to 60 different websites. We analyze how unique users are based on their behavior, and find out that 54.86% of users that have installed at least one detectable extension are unique; 19.53% of users are unique among those who have logged into one or more detectable websites; and 89.23% are unique among users with at least one extension and one login. We use…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsWeb Data Mining and Analysis · Spam and Phishing Detection · Advanced Malware Detection Techniques
