Fingerprinting for Web Applications: From Devices to Related Groups
Christine Blakemore, João Redol, Miguel Pupo Correia · 2016
Identifying users and user devices is as important in web applications as in many other contexts. In web applications, user identification usually involves an authentication process, e.g., providing a username and a password. Identification is also possible without explicit authentication using cookies or device fingerprints. Device fingerprinting is also useful for other purposes, e.g., to serve as a second factor of authentication. Recently some interest appeared in the problem of cross-device fingerprinting, i.e., of the identification of the same user in different devices using fingerprinting. We target a variation of the problem that we call related group fingerprinting. We define a related group as a set of persons (e.g., a family) that share the same home network. We devised a related group fingerprinting scheme that we evaluated experimentally with data from hundreds of users. This evaluation suggests that group fingerprinting is feasible.