Device Fingerprinting

Device fingerprinting (DFP) technology aggregates various attributes of a user’s device into a single identifier. These attributes are required to be available in order for the website to load and display property. Some common attributes include:

• Browser type

• Screen size

• Operating system

• Timezone

By combining them into an identifier, there’s enough entropy to ensure that the identifier is unique to each device.

Device Fingerprinting provides a repeatable, unique identifier that is used to detect and block fraudulent actors — but many DFP solutions on the market are easily reverse engineered by attackers, rendering your site vulnerable. Stytch’s defense-in-depth approach to DFP allows us to obfuscate the fingerprinting process in a way that makes it tamper-resistant to this reverse engineering and spoofing, protecting you against even the most sophisticated attackers.

Stytch’s Device Fingerprinting product identifies a user’s device by aggregating a mix of industry standard and proprietary signals into a set of stable identifiers while leveraging multiple security measures to prevent reverse engineering. Stytch’s device fingerprints remain stable across incognito browsing, webviews, VPNs, changes to user agent or IP addresses, and more.

Some of our features include:

• Signals that are 99.9% unique to the device.

• Clear Action Recommendations (ALLOW, BLOCK, CHALLENGE).

• Multiple fingerprint types for different use cases.

• Encryption at rest and in transit to prevent bad actors from reverse engineering the product.

The core of Stytch’s Device Fingerprint product is a Javascript library. The Javascript library calls a Web Assembly binary to gather and send the signals to the Stytch backend for processing. The Stytch backend will process the fingerprint and return a telemetry ID that can be used to look up the Stytch Fingerprint with a clear set of recommendations.

Learn how to bootstrap DFP in just a few minutes.

If you are interested in enabling our DFP product for your project, please reach out to Stytch.