How to Conceal WebDriver in Geckodriver from BotD in Java?

Question

I followed this post on Stackoverflow to disable Firefox WebDriver detection.

Launch Geckodriver:

System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver", geckdriverExecutableFilePath);



File firefoxProfileFile = new File(fullPathOfFirefoxInstallationFolder);



FirefoxProfile firefoxProfile = null;

        
 try {
    firefoxProfile = new FirefoxProfile(firefoxProfileFile);
     } catch (Exception e) {

    e.printStackTrace();
     }

I disabled WebDriver:

WebDriver Disabled

FirefoxOptions firefoxOptions = new FirefoxOptions();

firefoxOptions.setProfile(firefoxProfile);

// Disables WebRTC
firefoxProfile.setPreference("media.peerconnection.enabled", false);

I disabled Automation Extensions:

Automation Extension Disabled

// Disables Automation Extension
firefoxProfile.setPreference("useAutomationExtension", false);

I added Proxy:

    DesiredCapabilities dc = DesiredCapabilities.firefox();
    Proxy proxy = new Proxy();
    proxy.setHttpProxy(ipAddress + ":" + port);
    proxy.setFtpProxy(ipAddress + ":" + port);
    proxy.setSslProxy(ipAddress + ":" + port);

   dc.setCapability(CapabilityType.PROXY, proxy);




   firefoxOptions.merge(dc);

   driver = new FirefoxDriver(firefoxOptions);

Yet BotD still detects my browser as being controlled by automation tool.

BotD Detection

How can I solve this?

Answer 1

When using Selenium driven GeckoDriver initiated firefox Browsing Context

The webdriver-active flag is set to true when the user agent is under remote control. It is initially false.

where, webdriver returns true if webdriver-active flag is set, false otherwise.

As:

navigator.webdriver Defines a standard way for co-operating user agents to inform the document that it is controlled by WebDriver, for example so that alternate code paths can be triggered during automation.

Further @whimboo in his comments confirmed:

This implementation have to be conformant to this requirement. As such we will not provide a way to circumvent that.

---

Conclusion

So, the bottom line is:

Selenium identifies itself

and there is no way to conceal the fact that the browser is WebDriver driven.

---

Recommendations

However some pundits have suggested some different approaches which can conceal the fact that the Mozilla Firefox browser is WebDriver controled through the usage of Firefox Profiles and Proxies as follows:

selenium4 compatible python code

from selenium.webdriver import Firefox
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.firefox.service import Service
from selenium.webdriver.firefox.options import Options

profile_path = r'C:\Users\Admin\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\s8543x41.default-release'
options=Options()
options.set_preference('profile', profile_path)
options.set_preference('network.proxy.type', 1)
options.set_preference('network.proxy.socks', '127.0.0.1')
options.set_preference('network.proxy.socks_port', 9050)
options.set_preference('network.proxy.socks_remote_dns', False)
service = Service('C:\\BrowserDrivers\\geckodriver.exe')
driver = Firefox(service=service, options=options)
driver.get("https://www.google.com")
driver.quit()

---

Potential Solution

A potential solution would be to use the tor browser as follows:

selenium4 compatible python code

from selenium.webdriver import Firefox  
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.firefox.service import Service
from selenium.webdriver.firefox.options import Options
import os

torexe = os.popen(r'C:\Users\username\Desktop\Tor Browser\Browser\TorBrowser\Tor\tor.exe')
profile_path = r'C:\Users\username\Desktop\Tor Browser\Browser\TorBrowser\Data\Browser\profile.default'
firefox_options=Options()
firefox_options.set_preference('profile', profile_path)
firefox_options.set_preference('network.proxy.type', 1)
firefox_options.set_preference('network.proxy.socks', '127.0.0.1')
firefox_options.set_preference('network.proxy.socks_port', 9050)
firefox_options.set_preference("network.proxy.socks_remote_dns", False)
firefox_options.binary_location = r'C:\Users\username\Desktop\Tor Browser\Browser\firefox.exe'
service = Service('C:\\BrowserDrivers\\geckodriver.exe')
driver = webdriver.Firefox(service=service, options=firefox_options)
driver.get("https://www.tiktok.com/")

---

References

You can find a couple of relevant detailed discussions in

• How to initiate a Tor Browser 9.5 which uses the default Firefox to 68.9.0esr using GeckoDriver and Selenium through Python
• How to connect to Tor browser using Python
• How to use Tor with Chrome browser through Selenium

Answer 2

BotD detects you because you do not override navigator.webdriver attribute.

I was able to override it with this code:

((JavascriptExecutor)driver).executeScript("Object.defineProperty(navigator, 'webdriver', {get: () => undefined})");

Re-run your code with this line after driver.get("BotD url") and click on 'Start detect' on the BotD page.

It will no longer show that webdriver is detected.

I understand you are looking for a way to make it work before the initial page load.

But here are 2 things to consider:

1. Webdriver developers want their tool to be detected by browsers.
2. Gecko driver developers are not going to implement an option to disable navigator.webdriver attribute. (This is the official reply from gecko developer.)