java - Selenium webdriver: Modifying navigator.webdriver flag to prevent selenium detection

Question

I'm trying to automate a very basic task in a website using selenium and chrome but somehow the website detects when chrome is driven by selenium and blocks every request. I suspect that the website is relying on an exposed DOM variable like this one https://stackoverflow.com/a/41904453/648236 to detect selenium driven browser.

My question is, is there a way I can make the navigator.webdriver flag false? I am willing to go so far as to try and recompile the selenium source after making modifications, but I cannot seem to find the NavigatorAutomationInformation source anywhere in the repository https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium

Any help is much appreciated

P.S: I also tried the following from https://w3c.github.io/webdriver/#interface

Object.defineProperty(navigator, 'webdriver', {
    get: () => false,
  });

But it only updates the property after the initial page load. I think the site detects the variable before my script is executed.

Answer 1

First the update ¹

execute_cdp_cmd(): With the availability of execute_cdp_cmd(cmd, cmd_args) command now you can easily execute google-chrome-devtools commands using Selenium. Using this feature you can modify the navigator.webdriver easily to prevent Selenium from getting detected.

---

Preventing Detection ²

To prevent Selenium driven WebDriver getting detected a niche approach would include either/all of the below mentioned steps:

• Adding the argument --disable-blink-features=AutomationControlled

  from selenium import webdriver
  
  options = webdriver.ChromeOptions() 
  options.add_argument('--disable-blink-features=AutomationControlled')
  driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options, executable_path=r'C:WebDriverschromedriver.exe')
  driver.get("https://www.website.com")
  

You can find a relevant detailed discussion in Selenium can't open a second page

• Rotating the user-agent through execute_cdp_cmd() command as follows:

  #Setting up Chrome/83.0.4103.53 as useragent
  driver.execute_cdp_cmd('Network.setUserAgentOverride', {"userAgent": 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/83.0.4103.53 Safari/537.36'})
  

• Change the property value of the navigator for webdriver to undefined

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

• Exclude the collection of enable-automation switches

  options.add_experimental_option("excludeSwitches", ["enable-automation"])
  

• Turn-off useAutomationExtension

  options.add_experimental_option('useAutomationExtension', False)
  

---

Sample Code ³

Clubbing up all the steps mentioned above and effective code block will be:

from selenium import webdriver

options = webdriver.ChromeOptions() 
options.add_argument("start-maximized")
options.add_experimental_option("excludeSwitches", ["enable-automation"])
options.add_experimental_option('useAutomationExtension', False)
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options, executable_path=r'C:WebDriverschromedriver.exe')
driver.execute_script("Object.defineProperty(navigator, 'webdriver', {get: () => undefined})")
driver.execute_cdp_cmd('Network.setUserAgentOverride', {"userAgent": 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/83.0.4103.53 Safari/537.36'})
print(driver.execute_script("return navigator.userAgent;"))
driver.get('https://www.httpbin.org/headers')

---

History

As per the W3C Editor's Draft the current implementation strictly mentions:

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

Further,

Navigator includes NavigatorAutomationInformation;

It is to be noted that:

The NavigatorAutomationInformation interface should not be exposed on WorkerNavigator.

The NavigatorAutomationInformation interface is defined as:

interface mixin NavigatorAutomationInformation {
    readonly attribute boolean webdriver;
};

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

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

Caution: Altering/tweaking the above mentioned parameters may block the navigation and get the WebDriver instance detected.

---

Update (6-Nov-2019)

As of the current implementation an ideal way to access a web page without getting detected would be to use the ChromeOptions() class to add a couple of arguments to:

• Exclude the collection of enable-automation switches
• Turn-off useAutomationExtension

through an instance of ChromeOptions as follows:

• Java Example:

  System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C:\Utility\BrowserDrivers\chromedriver.exe");
  ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
  options.setExperimentalOption("excludeSwitches", Collections.singletonList("enable-automation"));
  options.setExperimentalOption("useAutomationExtension", false);
  WebDriver driver =  new ChromeDriver(options);
  driver.get("https://www.google.com/");
  

• Python Example

  from selenium import webdriver
  
  options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
  options.add_experimental_option("excludeSwitches", ["enable-automation"])
  options.add_experimental_option('useAutomationExtension', False)
  driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options, executable_path=r'C:pathochromedriver.exe')
  driver.get("https://www.google.com/")
  

---

Legends

¹: Applies to Selenium's Python clients only.

²: Applies to Selenium's Python clients only.

³: Applies to Selenium's Python clients only.