Psylo Browser Obscures Digital Fingerprints By Giving Every Tab Its Own IP Address (theregister.com) 20
Psylo, a new privacy-focused iOS browser by Mysk, aims to defeat digital fingerprinting by isolating each browser tab with its own IP address, unique fingerprinting defenses, and proxy-based encryption. "Psylo stands out as it is the only WebKit-based iOS browser that truly isolates tabs," Tommy Mysk told The Register. "It's not only about separate storage and cookies. Psylo goes beyond that."
"This is why we call tabs 'silos.' It applies unique anti-fingerprinting measures per silo, such as canvas randomization. This way two Psylo tabs opening the same website would appear as though they originated on two different devices to the opened website." From the report: The company claims Psylo therefore offers better privacy than a VPN because the virtual networks mask the user's IP address but generally don't alter the data used for fingerprinting. Psylo, for example, will adjust the browser's time zone and browser language to match the geolocation of each proxy, resulting in more entropy that means fingerprints created by gathering data from silos will appear to be different.
The Mysk devs' post states that some privacy-focused browsers like Brave also implement anti-fingerprinting measures like canvas randomization, but those are more effective on the desktop macOS app due to Apple's iOS restrictions. They claim that they were able to achieve better results on iOS by using a client-side JavaScript solution. Mysk designed Psylo to minimize the information available to its maker. It doesn't log personally identifiable information or browsing data that the curious could use to identify the user, the company claims, noting that it also doesn't have customer payment information, which is handled by Apple. There are no user accounts, only randomized identifiers to indicate active subscriptions. According to Tommy Mysk, the only subscriber data kept is bandwidth usage, which is necessary to prevent abuse.
"We aggregate bandwidth usage based on a randomly generated ID that is created when a subscription is made," Mysk said. "The randomly generated ID is associated with the Apple subscription transaction. Apple doesn't share the identity of users making App Store purchases with developers." Asked whether Apple could identify users, Mysk said, "Theoretically and given a court order, Apple can figure out the randomly generated ID of the user in question. If we were to hand out the data associated with the randomly generated ID, it would only be the bandwidth usage of that user in the current month, and two months in the past. Older data is automatically deleted. "We don't associate any identifiable information with the randomly generated ID. We don't store IP addresses at all in every component of our system. We don't store websites visited by our users at all." The browser is only available on iOS and iPadOS, but Mysk says an Android version could be developed if there's enough interest. It costs $9.99 per month or $99 per year in the U.S.
"This is why we call tabs 'silos.' It applies unique anti-fingerprinting measures per silo, such as canvas randomization. This way two Psylo tabs opening the same website would appear as though they originated on two different devices to the opened website." From the report: The company claims Psylo therefore offers better privacy than a VPN because the virtual networks mask the user's IP address but generally don't alter the data used for fingerprinting. Psylo, for example, will adjust the browser's time zone and browser language to match the geolocation of each proxy, resulting in more entropy that means fingerprints created by gathering data from silos will appear to be different.
The Mysk devs' post states that some privacy-focused browsers like Brave also implement anti-fingerprinting measures like canvas randomization, but those are more effective on the desktop macOS app due to Apple's iOS restrictions. They claim that they were able to achieve better results on iOS by using a client-side JavaScript solution. Mysk designed Psylo to minimize the information available to its maker. It doesn't log personally identifiable information or browsing data that the curious could use to identify the user, the company claims, noting that it also doesn't have customer payment information, which is handled by Apple. There are no user accounts, only randomized identifiers to indicate active subscriptions. According to Tommy Mysk, the only subscriber data kept is bandwidth usage, which is necessary to prevent abuse.
"We aggregate bandwidth usage based on a randomly generated ID that is created when a subscription is made," Mysk said. "The randomly generated ID is associated with the Apple subscription transaction. Apple doesn't share the identity of users making App Store purchases with developers." Asked whether Apple could identify users, Mysk said, "Theoretically and given a court order, Apple can figure out the randomly generated ID of the user in question. If we were to hand out the data associated with the randomly generated ID, it would only be the bandwidth usage of that user in the current month, and two months in the past. Older data is automatically deleted. "We don't associate any identifiable information with the randomly generated ID. We don't store IP addresses at all in every component of our system. We don't store websites visited by our users at all." The browser is only available on iOS and iPadOS, but Mysk says an Android version could be developed if there's enough interest. It costs $9.99 per month or $99 per year in the U.S.
Tab silos (Score:2, Interesting)
It is a neat idea. How come this is on iOS only, however? You would think the desktop would be the first target.
My thinking is on mobile devices people use mostly apps and do a minimal amount of surfing. If you do a lot of web activities - the Desktop is a far more efficient place to work.
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"It is a neat idea. How come this is on iOS only, however? You would think the desktop would be the first target."
Maybe Mysk doesn't know what a desktop is. And it's not a neat idea.
"If you do a lot of web activities - the Desktop is a far more efficient place to work."
Doesn't matter where you prefer to work, it matters where they think they're going to get money.
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It's two guys whose other project was an iOS collaborative whiteboard app. I'd guess they are iOS developers in their day job.
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Your out of touch there gramps, anyone under the age of 25 only uses a phone. That and apps are easy to build all they do is suck out user data anyway.
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Tor has existed since 2002, and on Android since 2018.
Well aware of Tor. It's not ideal for common usage scenarios. One is that it is often slow due to the Tor network and performance can be inconsistent, but apart from Tor's performance considerations, and resource requirements:
Using Tor in itself also makes you stand out. The Tor exit nodes' IP addresses are well-known, and not only will you still be tracked by websites. You are adding a datapoint about you on them for websites you do log in to.
wut? (Score:3)
We'll call it a silo now so we can pretend it is something new. It's not a sandbox, it's not a virtual machine, it's a silo!
If nothing breaks providing a "wrong" IP address, the IP address isn't needed in the first place and it's not an IP address if it doesn't live outside the application. Saying that tabs get unique IP addresses is bullshit. If you don't see it on the wire it doesn't exist.
Re: wut? (Score:4, Informative)
How about a new IP for every click (Score:2)
Within a tab, the website can still easily track your movements.
$10/mo (Score:2)
Re: stick it up there where the sun never shines (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, leave seattle out of this!
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Sounds cheap for a vpn that assigns you one IP per tab. Most VPN assign you like maximum 5 connections for $5 to $20 per Month.
Better be IPv6... (Score:1)
I hope they're using IPv6. If it's IPv4 I'm going to exhaust the address space.
Re:Better be IPv6... (Score:4, Informative)
It uses a proxy, so each of your tabs appears to come from one of the IP addresses of their proxy. It's like those things that obfuscate Bitcoin transactions, but for HTTP connections.
"...as it is the only WebKit-based iOS browser..." (Score:1)
The Cloudflare Denial of Service attack (Score:1, Interesting)
Face it, the era of the anonymous internet is all but over. The future is a Chinese internet. The CPC requires real name verification to connect to any usable service. This makes most attacks
Re: The Cloudflare Denial of Service attack (Score:2)
I wonâ(TM)t be participating in your communist utopia. The CCP is not something to strive to emulate.
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I wonâ(TM)t be participating in your communist utopia. The CCP is not something to strive to emulate.
I don't think he was endorsing Communism or casting it as utopian. He was merely pointing out that the greater Web is destined to become what the Chinese Web already is. And FWIW, I think he's probably correct.