Pierre Laperdrix

Full-time researcher at CNRS

Contact Me

About Me

I am currently a full-time researcher (Chargé de Recherche) for CNRS in the CRIStAL laboratory. I am working in the SPIRALS team on computer security and privacy with a touch of software engineering.

Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the PragSec lab at Stony Brook University and, after, in the Secure Web Applications Group at Cispa.

I obtained my PhD working on browser fingerprinting in the DiverSE team at INRIA Rennes where I developed the AmIUnique.org and Fingerprint Central websites.

Scientific publications

  • 2024

  • Free Proxies Unmasked: A Vulnerability and Longitudinal Analysis of Free Proxy Services

    Naif Mehanna, Walter Rudametkin, Pierre Laperdrix and Antoine Vastel
    Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Measurements, Attacks, and Defenses for the Web (MADWeb 2024)
    San Diego, CA, USA
    - Distinguished Paper Award
    PDF
  • 2023

  • UA-Radar: Exploring the Impact of User Agents on the Web

    Jean Luc Intumwayase, Imane Fouad, Pierre Laperdrix and Romain Rouvoy
    Proceedings of the 22nd Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES 2023)
    Copenhagen, Denmark
    PDF

  • Breaking Bad: Quantifying the Addiction of Web Elements to JavaScript

    Romain Fouquet, Pierre Laperdrix and Romain Rouvoy
    Journal ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT)
    - Media coverage NextInpact (FR)
    PDF

  • 2022

  • Multi-variant Execution at the Edge

    Javier Cabrera Arteaga, Pierre Laperdrix, Martin Monperrus and Benoit Baudry
    Proceedings of the 9th ACM Workshop on Moving Target Defense (MTD 2022)
    Los Angeles, CA, USA
    PDF

  • The Price to Play: A Privacy Analysis of Free and Paid Games in the Android Ecosystem

    Pierre Laperdrix, Naif Mehanna, Antonin Durey and Walter Rudametkin
    Proceedings of the 2022 edition of The Web Conference (WWW 2022)
    Online
    - Media coverage Inria (FR) Journal du CNRS (FR) JV Culture Jeu Vidéo n°95 (FR)
    PDF Artifact

  • JSRehab: Weaning Common Web Interface Components from JavaScript Addiction

    Romain Fouquet, Pierre Laperdrix and Romain Rouvoy
    Companion proceedings of the 2022 edition of The Web Conference (WWW 2022, Special track: "Web developer and W3C")
    Online
    PDF Artifact

  • DRAWNAPART: A Device Identification Technique based on Remote GPU Fingerprinting

    Tomer Laor, Naif Mehanna, Antonin Durey, Vitaly Dyadyuk, Pierre Laperdrix, Clémentine Maurice, Yossi Oren, Romain Rouvoy, Walter Rudametkin and Yuval Yarom
    Proceedings of the 29th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2022)
    San Diego, CA, USA
    - First Place at CSAW'22 MENA Applied Research Competition
    - Media coverage Forbes The Hacker News BleepingComputer BitDefender TechRadar Gizmodo
    PDF Artifact

  • 2021

  • SoK: In Search of Lost Time: A Review of JavaScript Timers in Browsers

    Thomas Rokicki, Clémentine Maurice and Pierre Laperdrix
    Proceedings of the 6th IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P 2021)
    Online
    PDF Artifact

  • Fingerprinting in Style: Detecting Browser Extensions via Injected Style Sheets

    Pierre Laperdrix, Oleksii Starov, Quan Chen, Alexandros Kapravelos and Nick Nikiforakis
    Proceedings of the 30th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Sec. 2021)
    Online
    PDF Artifact

  • FP-Redemption: Studying Browser Fingerprinting Adoption for the Sake of Web Security

    Antonin Durey, Pierre Laperdrix, Walter Rudametkin, Romain Rouvoy
    Proceedings of the 18th Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware & Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA 2021)
    Online (acceptance rate: 29%)
    PDF Dataset

  • Déjà vu: Abusing Browser Cache Headers to Identify and Track Online Users

    Vikas Mishra, Pierre Laperdrix, Walter Rudametkin and Romain Rouvoy
    Proceedings of the 21st Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2021)
    Online
    PDF

  • Careful Who You Trust: Studying the Pitfalls of Cross-Origin Communication

    Gordon Meiser, Pierre Laperdrix and Ben Stock
    Proceedings of the 6th ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS 2021)
    Online
    PDF

  • 2020

  • Web Runner 2049: Evaluating Third-Party Anti-bot Services

    Babak Amin Azad, Oleksii Starov, Pierre Laperdrix and Nick Nikiforakis
    Proceedings of the 17th Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware & Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA 2020)
    Lisboa, Portugal (acceptance rate: 29%)
    PDF

  • Taming The Shape Shifter: Detecting Anti-fingerprinting Browsers

    Babak Amin Azad, Oleksii Starov, Pierre Laperdrix and Nick Nikiforakis
    Proceedings of the 17th Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware & Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA 2020)
    Lisboa, Portugal (acceptance rate: 29%)
    PDF

  • Don’t count me out: On the relevance of IP addresses in the tracking ecosystem

    Vikas Mishra, Pierre Laperdrix, Antoine Vastel, Walter Rudametkin, Romain Rouvoy and Martin Lopatka
    Proceedings of the 2020 edition of The Web Conference (WWW 2020)
    Taipei, Taïwan (acceptance rate: 19%)
    PDF

  • Browser fingerprinting: A survey

    Pierre Laperdrix, Nataliia Bielova, Benoit Baudry and Gildas Avoine
    Journal ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB)
    PDF

  • 2019

  • Less is More: Quantifying the Security Benefits of Debloating Web Applications

    Babak Amin Azad, Pierre Laperdrix and Nick Nikiforakis
    Proceedings of the 28th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Sec. 2019)
    Santa Clara, CA, USA (acceptance rate: 16%)
    PDF Artifact

  • Morellian Analysis for Browsers: Making Web Authentication Stronger With Canvas Fingerprinting

    Pierre Laperdrix, Gildas Avoine, Benoit Baudry and Nick Nikiforakis
    Proceedings of the 16th Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware & Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA 2019)
    Gothenburg, Sweden (acceptance rate: 29%)
    PDF Artifact Demo

  • Unnecessarily Identifiable: Quantifying the fingerprintability of browser extensions due to bloat

    Oleksii Starov, Pierre Laperdrix, Alexandros Kapravelos and Nick Nikiforakis
    Proceedings of the 2019 edition of The Web Conference (WWW 2019)
    San Fransisco, CA, USA (acceptance rate: 20%)
    PDF Artifact

  • Time Does Not Heal All Wounds: A Longitudinal Analysis of Security-Mechanism Support in Mobile Browsers

    Meng Luo, Pierre Laperdrix, Nima Honarmand, Nick Nikiforakis
    Proceedings of the 26th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2019)
    San Diego, CA, USA (acceptance rate: 17%)
    PDF

  • 2018

  • FP-Scanner: The Privacy Implications of Browser Fingerprint Inconsistencies

    Antoine Vastel, Pierre Laperdrix, Walter Rudametkin, Romain Rouvoy
    Proceedings of the 27th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Sec. 2018)
    Baltimore, MD, USA (acceptance rate: 19%)
    PDF

  • FP-STALKER: Tracking Browser Fingerprint Evolutions

    Antoine Vastel, Pierre Laperdrix, Walter Rudametkin, Romain Rouvoy
    Proceedings of the 39th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P 2018)
    San Francisco, CA, USA (acceptance rate: 11%)
    PDF

  • Hiding in the Crowd: an Analysis of the Effectiveness of Browser Fingerprinting at Large Scale

    Alejandro Gómez-Boix, Pierre Laperdrix, Benoit Baudry
    Proceedings of the 2018 edition of The Web Conference (WWW 2018)
    Lyon, France (acceptance rate: 15%)
    PDF

  • 2017

  • FPRandom: Randomizing core browser objects to break advanced device fingerprinting techniques

    Pierre Laperdrix, Benoit Baudry, Vikas Mishra
    Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Engineering Secure Software and Systems (ESSoS 2017)
    Bonn, Germany (acceptance rate: 37%)
    - Distinguished Artifact Award
    - Similar defense technique added in the Brave browser Brave blog Inria blog
    PDF Slides Artifact

  • 2016

  • Beauty and the Beast: Diverting modern web browsers to build unique browser fingerprints

    Pierre Laperdrix, Walter Rudametkin, Benoit Baudry
    Proceedings of the 37th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P 2016)
    San Jose, CA, USA (acceptance rate: 13%)
    - 2018 CNIL-Inria European Privacy Protection Award
    PDF Slides Video

  • 2015

  • Mitigating browser fingerprint tracking: multi-level reconfiguration and diversification

    Pierre Laperdrix, Walter Rudametkin, Benoit Baudry
    Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS 2015)
    Florence, Italy (acceptance rate: 29%)
    PDF Slides Artifact (Original) Artifact (Docker)

PhD Thesis

  • Browser Fingerprinting: Exploring Device Diversity to Augment Authentication and Build Client-Side Countermeasures

    Pierre Laperdrix
    Defense in October 2017
    - Honorable mention for the 2018 Gilles Kahn PhD thesis award
    PDF

Projects

AmIUnique.org - Learn how identifiable you are on the Internet

A website to inform users on the dangers of browser fingerprinting
Open Source

AmIUnique.org

The goal of this website is to measure and study the diversity of web browsers and establish statistical profiles of browser fingerprints.

By connecting to AmIUnique, you cannot only check your browser fingerprint and see how unique you are in the web ecosystem, you will also contribute in building a database of genuine fingerprints that will help us build solutions to prevent fingerprint tracking.

Source: View on GitHub

View your browser fingerprint


In addition to the AmIUnique website, I developed extensions for Chrome and Firefox to understand the evolution of fingerprints and study it in depth.

With them, the user can see the evolution of his fingerprint on his own timeline and be notified as soon as a change is detected.

AmIUnique extension for Firefox     AmIUnique extension for Chrome

Fingerprint Central - A project for the Tor organization

A website to help developers design smart defences against browser fingerprinting
Developed as part of the Google Summer of Code 2016
Now officially part of the Tor Project - Official site
Open Source

FP Central
New

The capabilities of browser fingerprinting as a tool to track users online has been demonstrated by Panopticlick and other research papers since 2010. The Tor community is fully aware of the problem and the Tor browser has been modified to follow the "one fingerprint for all" approach. However, due to the constant evolution of the web and its underlying technologies, it has become a true challenge to always stay ahead of the latest fingerprinting techniques.

For this Google Summer of Code project, I'm developing the Fingerprint Central website that runs a fingerprinting test suite and collect data from Tor browsers to help developers design and test new defences against browser fingerprinting. The website is similar to AmIUnique.org or Panopticlick for users where they will get a complete summary with statistics after the test suite has been executed. It can be used to test new fingerprinting protection as well as making sure that fingerprinting-related bugs were correctly fixed with specific regression tests. The expected long-term impact of this project is to reduce the differences between Tor users and reinforce their privacy and anonymity online.

Links: View on GitHub View the GSoC proposal View status reports

Visit the official site

FPRandom - Breaking the stability of advanced fingerprinting techniques

A modified browser that introduces random noise inside core browser objects
Open Source

FPRandom

FPRandom is a modified version of Firefox 54, the latest Nightly version from Mozilla. FPRandom's primary goal is to break the stability and determinism of very specific fingerprinting techniques (Canvas, Audio, JavaScript engine) while preserving the best user experience possible. By introducing enough noise during the fingerprinting process, trackers are fooled and cannot bound a freshly collected fingerprint with an old one, thus rendering the tracking across multiple sessions impossible.

Source: View on GitHub

Test the Linux prototype

Blink on Docker

A new and improved version of Blink running completely inside Docker containers!
Open Source

Blink Docker

New features:

  • Improved performances: Thanks to the technology behind containers, Blink generates and launches complete environments in less than 10s! The footprint has also been drastically reduced compared to the size of complete virtual machines.
  • Easy installation: One script to build everything, one script to run everything! It cannot get simpler than that.
  • Integrated maintenance system: Updates to both Blink's core and the diversity reservoir are now automatically delivered!
  • Tor compatibility: You can now direct all your network traffic through the Tor network!

Source: View on GitHub View on Docker Hub

An early build without the complete set of features is now available. More information here!