Fingerprintability of WebRTC

David Fifield; Mia Gil Epner

Fingerprintability of WebRTC

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arxiv 1605.08805 v1 pith:RZFWCIJW submitted 2016-05-27 cs.CR

David Fifield , Mia Gil Epner This is my paper · ORCID

classification cs.CR

keywords webrtcbrowserscircumventiondistinguishingfingerprintingimplementationorderpeer-to-peer

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We examine WebRTC's suitability as a means of Internet censorship circumvention. WebRTC is a framework and suite of protocols for peer-to-peer communication between web browsers. We analyze the implementation differences in instantiations of WebRTC that make it possible to "fingerprint" implementations--potentially distinguishing circumvention-related uses from ordinary ones. This question is relevant to Snowflake, an upcoming circumvention system that uses WebRTC to turn web browsers into temporary peer-to-peer proxies. We conduct a manual analysis of WebRTC-using applications in order to map the space of distinguishing implementation features. We run a fingerprinting script on a day's worth of network traffic in order to quantify WebRTC's prevalence and diversity. Throughout, we find pitfalls that indicate that resisting fingerprinting in WebRTC is likely to be non-trivial.

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Cited by 1 Pith paper

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

Byte by Byte: Unmasking Browser Fingerprinting at the Function Level Using V8 Bytecode Transformers
cs.CR 2025-09 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

ByteDefender uses a Transformer trained on V8 bytecode to label individual JavaScript functions as fingerprinting or not, claiming function-level detection with 4% page-load overhead.

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