Morellian analysis for browsers: Making web authentication stronger with canvas fingerprinting

Abstract

In this paper, we present the first fingerprinting-based authentication scheme that is not vulnerable to trivial replay attacks. Our proposed canvas-based fingerprinting technique utilizes one key characteristic: it is parameterized by a challenge, generated on the server side. We perform an in-depth analysis of all parameters that can be used to generate canvas challenges, and we show that it is possible to generate unique, unpredictable, and highly diverse canvas-generated images each time a user logs onto a service. With the analysis of images collected from more than 1.1 million devices in a real-world large-scale experiment, we evaluate our proposed scheme against a large set of attack scenarios and conclude that canvas fingerprinting is a suitable mechanism for stronger authentication on the web.