Core Idea

The objective of this project is to demonstrate Browser Fingerprinting. Browser Fingerprinting allows web services to track your interaction on a website.

The most recent interactions can be tied back to previous interactions. All of this can be done without login information or cookies.

Live Demonstration

The website is live at www.noescape.ga

Setup Instructions

Incase anyone wants to try out the setup of the website themselves, the instructions can be found below. The process of setting up Mongo Express React Node cluster is derived from here

Pre-Requisites:

Setup Free Tier AWS-EC2 Instance

Make an account of AWS. Enter the credit/card details. No charges will be levied, but adding card information is a necessaary step.

Locate EC2 service, and click on it to enter EC2 Dashboard.

1. Select Launch Instance, in 'Choose AMI', Select Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS, x86 version
2. Leave all default selections as is launch the instance. Please note that in its current configuration, any IP would be able to access the EC2 instance.
3. When the instance is launched, right click on the instance and select connect. Configure the SSH connection mechanish and download the .pem file
4. Note the public DNS as it will be important in the next setp

Setup Free Tier MongoDB Cluster

1. An free-tier cluster needs to be setup on MongoDB Atlas service. The guide to setting it up can be found here or in video format here:

2. During the network whitelisting step, enter the EC2 Public IP. This means only the EC2 instance can access the Mongo DB database

3. When cluster is online, select 'Connect' and get the connection String. It should look something like this:

   mongodb+srv://pranavmrane:<password>@fingerprintingstorage-fsfmc.mongodb.net/test?retryWrites=true&w=majority
   

4. The password will for the cluster should be added in the connection string. This string will be used in a later step

Setting up application in EC2:

Log in to EC2 using SSH or Putty

cd /var/www
sudo rm -rf Website_Fingerprinting
sudo git clone https://github.com/pranavmrane/Website_Fingerprinting.git
cd Website_Fingerprinting
sudo bash setupServer.sh

Installation is done. Some additional steps are required.

cd /var/www/Website_Fingerprinting/backend
sudo vim .env

Paste the connection string obtained from Mongo DB Atlas into this file. Save file pressing Esc. And then :wq

cd /var/www/Website_Fingerprinting
sudo npm run build
cd backend
sudo pm2 start server.js
sudo service nginx stop && sudo service nginx start

To stop the server, do the following:

sudo pm2 stop all

The website will now be available on the public ip of EC2.

Remember to close the instance of EC2 and cluster of Mongo DB when the experiment is done.

Important File Locations

backend/routes/users.js: Contains Backend Code, processes data from front end

src/components/actionlist.component.js: Front End code, accept data and display response