To Extend or not to Extend: on the Uniqueness of Browser Extensions and Web Logins

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 an advanced fingerprinting algorithm and show that it is possible to identify a user in less than 625 milliseconds by selecting the most unique combinations of extensions. Because privacy extensions contribute to the uniqueness of users, we study the trade-off between the amount of trackers blocked by such extensions and how unique the users of these extensions are. We have found that privacy extensions should be considered more useful than harmful. The paper concludes with possible countermeasures.