Forging HTTP headers, OS fingerprinting, etc.

ilan1 · 02-14-2006, 01:25 PM

When I do regular web surfing, I know that via HTTP headers, the
websites I connect to can see that I am running Linux and I was
wondering if there was an easy way for me to forge these headers
to make those sites think that I am running Windoze.

Could somebody clue me in?

BTW, I run the Knoppix live CD fairly often, especially when I login
to sensitive sites like my online banking/ebay/Paypal, but usually run
Fedora Core 4 for ordinary stuff.

Ilan

The MCP · 02-14-2006, 03:00 PM

The identifying information is in the browser's User-Agent string. If you look through Apache logs, it's the last field of information. Windows typically sends something like "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)". There's no need to forge anything, browsers make it quite easy to change the UA string:

In Konqueror, look under Settings -> Configure Konqueror -> Browser ID to configure the default UA and set specific ones for problem sites.
In Firefox, enter 'about:config' into the browser bar. Search for 'agent' and configure the general.useragent. strings that show up as desired.

Matir · 02-14-2006, 09:07 PM

In Firefox, there's a "User-agent" extension available.

rino.caldelli · 03-04-2006, 11:12 AM

yes but what about the operating system? i didn't find an option to chenge it to windows...

win32sux · 03-04-2006, 07:40 PM

did you at least take a look at the extension that was suggested??

it does the OS thing, etc...

https://addons.mozilla.org/extension...cation=firefox

BTW, you can do this easily (regardless of browser) with a couple lines in your squid.conf if you use squid... here's what mine kinda looks like:

Code:

header_access User-Agent deny all
header_replace User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7
.5) Gecko/20041202 Firefox/1.0