this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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Generally browser fingerprinting is used to identify individual browser sessions across IP addresses. This mostly takes into account reported features and capabilities of the browser and OS to the website. Fingerprinting isn't looking for specific info your browser reports, it's taking it all and hashing it to get a unique id specific to the browser. Because it's hashed, it can't be reversed to identify the OS from the hash.
Sure a malicious website could Ignore the user agent and probe for some hardware capabilities that are specific to Linux, but that would be a lot of effort to probe various things which are set differently across all different browsers. I can't speak for bad actors, but I wouldn't spend the effort to check if the user agent is spoofed, if 95% of the time it's accurate to get the OS type.
It is trivial to identify OS platform because browser work differently on each platform. Wjat Librewolf does with useragent on Linux actually is makes users stand out more because it isn't what privacy.resistFingerprinting (RFP) reports on normally.
Hackers (like the comment scenario i was responding to) are substantially more likely to employ platform fingerprint than trust a fale useragent. And loads general websites employ fingerprinting, meaning deviation from default RFP behaviour makes you stand out (more than you already do by using RFP since it is a small pool already).
Agreed, I'm not saying it's impossible to detect the OS, but it's even more trivial for an adversary to regex the User Agent and serve the malware for that OS. The average user doesn't even know what a User Agent is, and that's who the drive by malware websites are counting on to infect because they're easy targets.
Just like a real fingerprint, that will only identify the fingerprint to a person, not tell you that the fingerprint is from someone who is European. Fingerprints are used to track you across different websites, and build a profile of you for advertising.
Yeah okay.
My logic was that it is much more likely that someone will spoof there useragent already if they are on Linux. If threat actor is targeting not just Windows but also Linux, they probably would understand the very real likelyhood of platform spoofing.