I am running the Chrome driver over Selenium on a Ubuntu server behind a residential proxy network. Yet, my Selenium is being detected. Is there a way to make the Chrome driver and Selenium 100% undetectable?
I have been trying for so long I lost track of the many things I have done including:
I am looking for a true version of Selenium that is 100% undetectable. If that ever existed. Or another automation way that is not detectable by bot trackers.
This is part of the starting of the browser:
sx = random.randint(1000, 1500) sn = random.randint(3000, 4500) display = Display(visible=0, size=(sx,sn)) display.start() randagent = random.randint(0,len(useragents_desktop)-1) uag = useragents_desktop[randagent] #this is to prevent ip leaking preferences = "webrtc.ip_handling_policy" : "disable_non_proxied_udp", "webrtc.multiple_routes_enabled": False, "webrtc.nonproxied_udp_enabled" : False chrome_options.add_experimental_option("prefs", preferences) chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-dev-shm-usage") chrome_options.add_argument("--no-sandbox") chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-impl-side-painting") chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-setuid-sandbox") chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-seccomp-filter-sandbox") chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-breakpad") chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-client-side-phishing-detection") chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-cast") chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-cast-streaming-hw-encoding") chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-cloud-import") chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-popup-blocking") chrome_options.add_argument("--ignore-certificate-errors") chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-session-crashed-bubble") chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-ipv6") chrome_options.add_argument("--allow-http-screen-capture") chrome_options.add_argument("--start-maximized") wsize = "--window-size=" + str(sx-10) + ',' + str(sn-10) chrome_options.add_argument(str(wsize) ) prefs = {"profile.managed_default_content_settings.images": 2} chrome_options.add_experimental_option("prefs", prefs) chrome_options.add_argument("blink-settings=imagesEnabled=true") chrome_options.add_argument("start-maximized") chrome_options.add_argument("user-agent="+uag) chrome_options.add_extension(pluginfile)#this is for the residential proxy driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path="/usr/bin/chromedriver", chrome_options=chrome_options)
https://github.com/ultrafunkamsterdam/undetected-chromedriver. Optimized Selenium Chromedriver patch which does not trigger anti-bot services like Distill Network / Imperva / DataDome / Botprotect.io Automatically downloads the driver binary and patches it.
The answer is YES! Websites can detect the automation using JavaScript experimental technology navigator. webdriver in the navigator interface.
webdriver is set to true by default when using Selenium. This variable will be present in Chrome as well as Firefox. This variable should be set to "undefined" to avoid detection. A proxy server can also be used to avoid detection.
The fact that selenium driven WebDriver gets detected doesn't depends on any specific Selenium, Chrome or ChromeDriver version. The Websites themselves can detect the network traffic and can identify the Browser Client i.e. Web Browser as WebDriver controled.
However some generic approaches to avoid getting detected while web-scraping are as follows:
time.sleep(secs)
. Here you can find a detailed discussion on How to sleep webdriver in python for milliseconds @Antoine Vastel in his blog site Detecting Chrome Headless mentioned several approaches, which distinguish the Chrome browser from a headless Chrome browser.
User agent: The user agent attribute is commonly used to detect the OS as well as the browser of the user. With Chrome version 59 it has the following value:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) HeadlessChrome/59.0.3071.115 Safari/537.36
A check for the presence of Chrome headless can be done through:
if (/HeadlessChrome/.test(window.navigator.userAgent)) { console.log("Chrome headless detected"); }
Plugins: navigator.plugins
returns an array of plugins present in the browser. Typically, on Chrome we find default plugins, such as Chrome PDF viewer
or Google Native Client
. On the opposite, in headless mode, the array returned contains no plugin.
A check for the presence of Plugins can be done through:
if(navigator.plugins.length == 0) { console.log("It may be Chrome headless"); }
Languages: In Chrome two Javascript attributes enable to obtain languages used by the user: navigator.language
and navigator.languages
. The first one is the language of the browser UI, while the second one is an array of string representing the user’s preferred languages. However, in headless mode, navigator.languages
returns an empty string.
A check for the presence of Languages can be done through:
if(navigator.languages == "") { console.log("Chrome headless detected"); }
WebGL: WebGL is an API to perform 3D rendering in an HTML canvas. With this API, it is possible to query for the vendor of the graphic driver as well as the renderer of the graphic driver. With a vanilla Chrome and Linux, we can obtain the following values for renderer and vendor: Google SwiftShader
and Google Inc.
. In headless mode, we can obtain Mesa OffScreen
, which is the technology used for rendering without using any sort of window system and Brian Paul
, which is the program that started the open source Mesa graphics library.
A check for the presence of WebGL can be done through:
var canvas = document.createElement('canvas'); var gl = canvas.getContext('webgl'); var debugInfo = gl.getExtension('WEBGL_debug_renderer_info'); var vendor = gl.getParameter(debugInfo.UNMASKED_VENDOR_WEBGL); var renderer = gl.getParameter(debugInfo.UNMASKED_RENDERER_WEBGL); if(vendor == "Brian Paul" && renderer == "Mesa OffScreen") { console.log("Chrome headless detected"); }
Not all Chrome headless will have the same values for vendor and renderer. Others keep values that could also be found on non headless version. However, Mesa Offscreen
and Brian Paul
indicates the presence of the headless version.
Browser features: Modernizr library enables to test if a wide range of HTML and CSS features are present in a browser. The only difference we found between Chrome and headless Chrome was that the latter did not have the hairline feature, which detects support for hidpi/retina hairlines
.
A check for the presence of hairline feature can be done through:
if(!Modernizr["hairline"]) { console.log("It may be Chrome headless"); }
Missing image: The last on our list also seems to be the most robust, comes from the dimension of the image used by Chrome in case an image cannot be loaded. In case of a vanilla Chrome, the image has a width and height that depends on the zoom of the browser, but are different from zero. In a headless Chrome, the image has a width and an height equal to zero.
A check for the presence of Missing image can be done through:
var body = document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0]; var image = document.createElement("img"); image.src = "http://iloveponeydotcom32188.jg"; image.setAttribute("id", "fakeimage"); body.appendChild(image); image.onerror = function(){ if(image.width == 0 && image.height == 0) { console.log("Chrome headless detected"); } }
You can find a couple of similar discussions in:
why not try undetected-chromedriver?
Optimized Selenium Chromedriver patch which does not trigger anti-bot services like Distill Network / Imperva / DataDome / Botprotect.io Automatically downloads the driver binary and patches it.
Tested until current chrome beta versions Works also on Brave Browser and many other Chromium based browsers Python 3.6++
you can install it with: pip install undetected-chromedriver
There are important things you should be ware of: Due to the inner workings of the module, it is needed to browse programmatically (ie: using .get(url) ). Never use the gui to navigate. Using your keybord and mouse for navigation causes possible detection! New Tabs: same story. If you really need multi-tabs, then open the tab with the blank page (hint: url is data:, including comma, and yes, driver accepts it) and do your thing as usual. If you follow these "rules" (actually its default behaviour), then you will have a great time for now.
In [1]: import undetected_chromedriver as uc In [2]: driver = uc.Chrome() In [3]: driver.execute_script('return navigator.webdriver') Out[3]: True # Detectable In [4]: driver.get('https://distilnetworks.com') # starts magic In [4]: driver.execute_script('return navigator.webdriver') In [5]: None # Undetectable!
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