| How realistic is an "advanced fingerprinting attack", though? I think the more realistic threat model here is presented by ad networks and major websites doing typical types of browser fingerprinting, like canvas, fonts, etc. as well as possibly some of the techniques mentioned in the article here, like webGL, JIT JS, etc. In that case of a limited number of trusted sites that we focus on ensuring compatibility with, spoofing is easier, because we can pay a lot of attention to ensuring that our "middleman" fixes the errors introduced by spoofed client-to-server communications. Some technologies like WebGL will simply never work on a spoofed site, of course. But for the very limited number of sites when users lose important functionality, they can just turn off Lockdown mode. If a Lockdown'd phone habitually patronizes malicious websites, the protection will never be enough anyway. So we shouldn't worry about protecting against being fingerprinted by a very malicious website - Lockdown users must simply avoid these, with or without a fingerprinting vulnerability! |
If your suggesting Apple should proxy all internet traffic to devices — that is a horrible idea, incredibly dangerous, and a huge step in the wrong direction. To counter the issues I pointed out, Apple would literally have to be able to decrypt all the traffic and act as if they were the user, which is obviously a insane security issue.
As for avoiding malicious websites, again, I don’t believe you understand what advanced attacks look like. Any site can be hacked and if it is, fingerprinting can be used to only attack a very well defined known list of targets. For example, a very well known CEO of a security startup used a limousine service that was hacked after this was discovered and used to launch at attack against them.
Understand your interested in the topic, that’s great, but try to balance your technical familiarity, familiarity with the topic, and the very real threat security breaches pose to very small subset of the world. These features are not intended to counter AD companies, but attackers that in the worst case situation will ultimately kill the target.