Collected research

The Dangers of Human Touch: Fingerprinting Browser Extensions through User Actions

Konstantinos Solomos, Panagiotis Ilia, Soroush Karami, Nick Nikiforakis and Jason Polakis · usenix.org

Browser extensions can be identified by page changes they make only once a user interacts with them, so this work derives user-action templates from static analysis and replays them dynamically to trigger otherwise hidden behaviour. It fingerprints 4,971 extensions, 36 percent invisible to prior methods, and finds about 67 percent accept JavaScript-simulated events from any page.

Record

Researcher

Konstantinos Solomos, Panagiotis Ilia, Soroush Karami, Nick Nikiforakis and Jason Polakis

Published by

usenix.org

Topic

Browser

In the archive

• Collected in the 2022 research round

Related sources

• USENIX Security '22 - The Dangers of Human Touch: Fingerprinting Browser Extensions through...

Tags

• browser-extension
• info-leak
• dom
• javascript
• static-analysis
• dynamic-analysis
• measurement-study
• defence

This page is the archive's own catalogue record. The research is the work of Konstantinos Solomos, Panagiotis Ilia, Soroush Karami, Nick Nikiforakis and Jason Polakis, first published at the original source. Preserved copies are kept so the citation survives its host; this one was last captured on 19 August 2026.