A Survey of Hardware Features in Modern Browsers: 2015 Edition

Abstract

Recently, Java Script with HTML5 has become popular for building Website. As a side effect, those technologies can be used to collect a so-called fingerprint that contains hardware information, such as battery status or screen size, of the browser device. A Web server can collect this information without the user's agreement. Our studies show that we can also collect information that could not be obtained with existing fingerprinting, e.g., The number of CPU cores, hard disk space, and so on. In this paper, we report the various kinds of information that can be collected by using Java Script with an HTML5 API.