DEV Community: Rutuj Runwal

A deep-dive into browser fingerprinting and privacy

Rutuj Runwal — Sun, 17 Jul 2022 15:00:00 +0000

Digital Privacy

The standard definition of privacy includes two important elements: “the state of being alone and not being watched or interrupted by other people.” But when you compare this with the ever-evolving digital world this definition begins to diminish.

When you are scrolling through say a social media app, you are physically alone but are you alone digitally?
Do you remember one of those instances where you talk about buying a product on an app and suddenly your whole browsing experience is interrupted by ads pertaining to that product?

So does that mean someone is spying on me?
Tracking my every move? My interests,likes,dislikes,purchases?!

Well, the answer to this is in some capacity both yes and no
You are a data point.
A data point is a discrete unit of information that when gathered in large amounts can be used to create a digital profile that can be leveraged by a company for business growth.

The blurring lines between data collection and privacy

Data is important, it helps businesses make appropriate decisions and it is crucial to get the right data at the right time. A website/service/application can collect data for the following use cases:

Audience Demographic Analysis
Find out section(s) of the website that get most interactivity(And improving the user experience for the onces that don't)
Protect against hacks
Detect and Block Malicious Access
Check if user is a bot
Verifying Ad revenue generation and providing tailored recommendations
Telemetry and "Anonymous" Usage Statistics

Data is necessary but a check is needed to find out the amount and kind of data some services collect. Take a look at the key-value pairs collected by a popular framework.It includes(but is not limited to) Users Geo location,The time of the visit,Whether user has a VPN service,Interaction with the content,Advertisments displayed to the user,Interaction with the advertisment,Interest based classification of user habits and so on.

Browser Fingerprinting

So now that we know what kind of data collection is possible from the user side let's take a quick look at what is possible to get from the browser itself.
A device fingerprint, machine fingerprint, or browser fingerprint is information collected about your device for the purpose of unique identification or "fingerprinting". Fingerprints can be used to fully or partially identify individual users or devices even when cookies are turned off. Just like our " fingerprints" are unique to you,digital fingerprints are unique to your browser.
Take a look at this excerpt of a script from doubleclick-net[A robust tracking network] employing fingerprinting technology.The code is obfuscated and minified but after pretty-printing,the snippet occurs at about line 8095:

This script extracts information like the type of operating system you use,screen resolution,timezone,if Js is enabled or not,browser type and version,language,active plugins,installed fonts,CPU class
device memory and various other settings.

Enforcing Privacy

To check how much fingerprinting data is sent out from your browser take a look at:
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
OR
https://amiunique.org/

To take back control of your private data and limit the amount of tracking by using open-source research-driven tools.

Browser Extensions

I have designed a modern open-source browser extensions that you can use to enforce privacy.

RR Adblocker:

RR Adblocker - Chrome Web Store

Rutuj Runwal's Adblocker blocks ads and trackers to make your web surfing faster and safer.

chromewebstore.google.com

You can test these products with a quick adblocker test(also opensource): Adblocker Test

Techniques

Modern web-browsers allow extensions to apply many techniques to limit tracking including filtering of requests based on pre-set lists,regEx,blocking 3rd party cookies,prioritizing HTTPS.
Recent advances in AI and deeplearning have also been tested and will be soon phased in browser extensions
Research by University of California, Davis:

web.cs.ucdavis.edu

Reference 1, Reference 2

Other Reads:
Creating a context-menu malware scanner: Here

Let's Connect: Linkedin
Thank you 😇
Cheers!

LGM-Summer Of Code Experience

Rutuj Runwal — Sat, 14 Aug 2021 04:33:34 +0000

Hello Everyone,

I am Rutuj Runwal and in this post I will be sharing my experience as an Open Source Contributor at Let's Grow More(LGM) through their Summmer of Code Program 2021.

The program was really well structured and had tons of projects to contribute from different types of fields.There were web-based projects such as Project Zone that suggests the user about the projects they can create based on their skills. There were also projects that had a combination of various self-reliant scripts in different languages ranging from basic scripts that do some required tasks to fully automated mega projects such as a Website Checker that detects vulnerabilities in a website.
Know More

As an opensource contributor, I collaborated with many open source projects and with 100+ PR's accepted in domains ranging from Web Development to AI and ML , My LGM-SoC journey was full of great learning and improving the open source projects.
Some of the projects that I worked on are:

LunaBot [A discord bot to educate people about the Stock Market and Crypto Market]
Project Zone [Tensorflow.js powered web-app suggests the user about the projects they can create]
Hacking Scripts [Provide utility scripts that might make everyday life easy]
Face-X [Recognition of human faces by different algorithms and frameworks.]

Let's Connect: Linkedin

Hey Reader, I have also created a Anti-malware app: Click Here👀

LGMVIP- Internship Experience

Rutuj Runwal — Tue, 27 Jul 2021 16:55:55 +0000

Hello Everyone,

I am Rutuj Runwal and in this post I will be sharing my experience as a Web Developer Intern at Let's Grow More(LGM) through their Virtual Internship Program that I had joined for July 2021.

It was a well-structured internship and as a Web Developer Intern I was expected to complete at least 2 out of the 3 listed tasks using relevant technologies. The tasks were as follows :-
Beginner Level Task :- Create a Single Page Website using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The website had to follow a predefined design pattern along with a few creative changes.
Intermediate Level Task :- Create a Web Application using ReactJs. The application had to feature an API call to display user data. It also featured a loader to be displayed while the data was still being fetched.
Advanced Level Task :- Student Result Management System using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and MySQL.

I have successfully completed the first two tasks and had learned a lot in this process.
Beginner Level: I always use bootstrap 5.0 as my go-to library when designing single page applications. It provides you with flexibility and creativity for your website while still maintaining responsiveness throughout your website. It was a good experience to design the webpage according to a predefined design and add extra bits into it to get an immersive experience.

Intermediate Level: I was exploring the wonderous capabilities that ReactJs had and I had already made a few projects using ReactJs earlier: Notes App and MoLog Marketing But I had never used external data from firebase or any API etc into my sites. Thus, this task gave me an insight into using API’s in react and it was the perfect time for me to understand more about React through this task. I used react-bootstrap to set up a clean UI to display the data. I also added a “Load More” functionality into my page to fetch and display more data onto my app.

Features:

Fetch and Display API Data
Responsive Design
Load More button to get more data

All the source code is present on my Github: here

Thus, It was a wonderful experience and an opportunity to explore more.

Let's Connect: Linkedin

Hey Reader, I have also created a Anti-malware app: Click Here👀

Context Menu Malware Scanner using Python

Rutuj Runwal — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 11:41:10 +0000

What is this?

Windows Context Menu Scanner[WCMS] helps you scan suspicious files for malware with just a right-click.The scanner is integrated right into the Windows Context Menu so you can Scan the file quickly.

How it Works?

Currently the scanner uses virustotal API to identify malware.When you right-click to Scan a file a lot is going on under the hood.The flowchart shown below puts it in simple words.

How will it be helpful?

Anti-virus softwares are great but at the same time are complicated to use and they hog a lot of memory.An average user wants something faster and lighter.WCMS is capable of scanning many file types without slowing you down.Just right-click and the results appear instantly.

Is that it?

No, I am currently working on this project and there will be several improvements[For Suggestions and Contributions: Linkedin ].Here are some of my plans:
Future Development

Adding Signatureless Offline Detection.
Using Datasets to Predict Samples
Adding better offline Analysis techniques: Techniques
Building realtime predictions about files using machine learning
A kind of "Heuristic analysis" that checks executable for size modification using earlier saved data[In form of TXT maybe]

Read More Here
Source code can be viewed at Github
Let's Connect: Linkedin
Thank you guys 😇
Cheers!