This started out as a port of the popular python project "undetectable chrome driver", originally an experiment to better understand what strategies were being employed to avoid detection. In addition, using a compiled language, receiving a large performance boost.
Right now it includes some basic crawling functionality and the basic patching functionality. My plan is to leverage existing crawling projects like "colly", or "rod", or "playwright"; this would let me focus on the portion that makes this project unique which is avoiding detection.
After I reach the limitations of making binary patches to the chromedriver, the next step would be making direct changes to the cpp source for the spec chrome webdriver client. However, now there exists at least a rust alternative available; and ideally these alternatives should be able to talk to more than one browser since the webdriver protocol is intended to be cross-browser.
Which may mean after a single webdriver implementation is determined, either binary or source patches will need to be made against the browsers themselves. Because the browser developers have incentive to not let you write automated browser software that is undetectable, and are almost certainly leaving in subtle flags that get raised when you use cdp or webdriver v2.
WebDriver is intended to be single protocol for interacting with every browser; and it is supported by Chrome, Firefox, Edge, IE, and Safari.
So shifting focus from specifically chromedriver to a more generic webdriver implementation makes sense as the next step forward for this project. And get more control over what we can change, to better conceal how our browsers are being driven; we will want to move from binary patches, to source code patches and compiling from source.
For more information, I recommend reviewing:
This is an open, transparent, and ideally a community project. Anyone is welcome to create issues, or submit pull requests.
All pull requests will be taken seriously, and you will not be dismissed or condescended to.
More details on development are located in the hidden file ".DEVELOPMENT.md".
Improve the binary patch functionality and get very basic web "crawler" to run basic tests.
Then leverage ideally "rod", or "colly"; both are existing well developed, high-level crawlers.
It is important to hand off this functionality at least for now so we can focus on what makes this software unique: evading detection of automated browsing.
At the last step, behavior-based concealment of browser automation, this can be re-evaluated; determining if it is suitable for our requirements and is using methods which effectively let us hide close enough to actual browser users that it becomes too difficult to de-tangle our browser automation from actual usage.
It may feel like an endless Cat-N-Mouse Game, but the truth is, the goal is just to get close enough to a "normal" browser that to block our browsers would require blocking normal users. This is not an endless arm-race, there is a point where if we modify the browser and our interaction with it, that hide among the crowd, in the same way Tor uses TLS to hide among normal web traffic.
After generating realistic randomized fingerprints, concealing developer or automation tools, the last step will be behavior based on how the input is provided explicitly to the JavaScript tools used to identify "normal".
A transparent proxy to block specific connections, file types, and cache locally common JavaScript, CSS, and other assets will let us obtain further performance improvements while giving us another layer which we can modify incoming and outgoing traffic, giving us a second front which we can use to conceal our automation.
I'm working on a tool to improve upon the great browser extension "Captcha Buster"; using local ML tools like OpenCV to solve ReCaptcha, OCR to solve many Image+Text Captchas, and introduce solutions for the other new captchas which would not be difficult to automate.
But this requires getting this project up to the behavior based tactics.
This project like all projects on this account is GPLv3 unless explicitly stated otherwise.