How to disable WebRTC to prevent IP leakage?

In Slimjet, you can easily disable WebRTC to prevent leakage of your IP address which is a problem in any other WebRTC-enabled browsers.

Security issue caused by the WebRTC feature

It is well known that the WebRTC feature in Chrome will leak your IP address even if you are behind a proxy server or using a VPN service. While most people who do not use proxy or VPN reveals their IP addresses to whatever web server they visit all the time, the IP address is the most easily accessible piece of information to track a website visitor. For the minimum, big companies such as Google and Facebook are using the IP addresses to analyzing your habits and behavior and send your highly-targeted ads. While most people are fine with targeted ads, there are people who don’t like to be tracked at all for whatever reason. They will choose to use either proxy or VPN service to avoid being tracked. However, in a browser which supports WebRTC, including Chrome, Slimjet and Firefox, the website owner can easily obtain the website visitor’s IP address by a simple piece of Javascript.

In addition to that, the WebRTC Media Device Enumeration API also enables the website owner to obtain a unique media device id from the user, which can be used to uniquely identify the visitor.

While Firefox provides an option to turn off the WebRTC feature, there is no such option available in Chrome, which isn’t completely surprising considering the fact that Chrome isn’t known fore being generous with options. There are people who mention this block WebRTC plugin. But in reality, this plugin can be easily bypassed and fails to work in all cases.

How to disable WebRTC in Slimjet

To address this security issue, we have provided a built-in option in Slimjet to easily disable WebRTC. If you have never used Slimjet before, Slimjet is based on the Chromium project while offers many more features and options to boost productivity and customizability. To disable WebRTC in Slimjet, select Settings from the menu, locate the option “Enable WebRTC” under the Security section as shown below,

disable webrtc in chrome

After uncheck the optoin “Enable WebRTC”, you will need close and reopen the tab for the setting to take effect.

How to verify the IP leackage issue is fixed

Here are three websites which can let you detect if your browser is liable to the IP leakage issue caused by WebRTC:

How to prevent canvas fingerprinting in Slimjet or Chrome

In Slimjet, users are given the option to disable reading from HTML canvas which will prevent any attempts to track users via canvas fingerprinting.

What is canvas fingerprinting?

Canvas fingerprinting is one of a number of browser fingerprinting techniques of tracking online users that allow websites to uniquely identify and track visitors using HTML5 canvas element instead of browser cookies or other similar means.

Canvas fingerprinting works by exploiting the HTML5 canvas element. When a user visits a website with canvas fingerprinting, their browser is instructed to “draw” a hidden line of text or 3D graphic that is then converted to a digital token. Variations in which GPU is installed or the graphics driver cause the variations in the rendered digital token. The token can be stored and shared with advertising partners to identify users when they visit affiliated websites. A profile can be created from the user’s browsing activity allowing advertisers to target advertising to the user’s inferred demographics and preferences.

How to prevent canvas fingerprinting in Slimjet or Chrome

Since canvas fingerprinting relies on reading data from the canvas element, we can effectively prevent any canvas fingerprinting by disabling such data reading. Fortunately, Chrome provides a hidden switch “–disable-reading-from-canvas“ for this purpose. But hey, who wants to type a long command line switch just to flip an option?

To make things more convenient for users, we have added an option in Slimjet to easily prevent /stop any canvas fingerprinting attempt. Just select ”Settings” from the menu and scroll down to the “Security” section. Then, turn on the option “Disable reading from HTML5 canvas” as shown in the following screenshot:

clipimage

After that, you need reload all existing tabs from the settings to take effect.