1562290 - Need a mechanism to limit gyroscope data leakage for fingerprinting

Status: NEW

(GeckoView :: General, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Colin Lee]

Our site permissions model does not currently seem to cover the gyroscope sensor. At least one user on Fenix 1.0 brought up the fact that the gyroscope can be used for browser fingerprinting. There should be some API mechanism for apps to control the gyro and similar onSensorChanged events.

Comment 1

[James Willcox (:snorp) ([e-mail]) (he/him)]

There's a bunch of stuff exposed right now that can be used for fingerprinting. The mitigations for these are extensive. I'm not sure if it will make much sense to plug a single hole here. Ethan, maybe you or someone on your team has some guidance?

Comment 2

[Ethan Tseng [:ethan]]

(In reply to James Willcox (:snorp) ([e-mail]) (he/him) from comment #1)

There's a bunch of stuff exposed right now that can be used for fingerprinting. The mitigations for these are extensive. I'm not sure if it will make much sense to plug a single hole here. Ethan, maybe you or someone on your team has some guidance?

We have implemented a lot of anti-fingerprinting patches to mitigate browser fingerprinting. All of them are being tracked under the meta bug 1329996 and controlled by a single pref "privacy.resistFingerprinting", which is off by default on Firefox.
Enabling resistFingerprinting will cause breakages. Even though we have also fixed a bunch of breakages (meta bug 1507517), there're still many remaining ones that would hamper the user experience.

I am wondering if we can test resistFingerprinting on GeckoView by simply flipping the pref.

Comment 3

[Ethan Tseng [:ethan]]

BTW, we have a wiki page which provides an overview of fingerprinting resistance features.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Fingerprinting

Comment 4

[Tom Ritter [:tjr]]

This bug refers to the default behavior of the browser and not the resist fingerprinting setting.

At present we haven't figured out a path forward for this, although it is on our radar...

Comment 6

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

P3 until we have a plan for addressing fingerprinting outside resistFingerprinting mode on mobile.

Comment 7

[Arthur Edelstein [:arthur]]

Which of the Sensor APIs are supported in Fenix? It would be good to spoof or disable these when the resistFingerprinting pref is enabled.

Comment 8

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

(In reply to Arthur Edelstein [:arthur] from comment #7)

Which of the Sensor APIs are supported in Fenix? It would be good to spoof or disable these when the resistFingerprinting pref is enabled.

AFAIK, GeckoView (and thus Fenix) supports all the same sensor APIs as desktop Firefox. I would expect the resistFingerprinting pref checks in core Gecko to work in GeckoView on Android.

Comment 9

[KOLANICH]

IMHO: all sensor APIs should be just deprecated and removed.

Comment 10

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Tasks and enhancements should have severity N/A.