Related papers: Profiling user activities with minimal traffic tra…
Users of electronic devices, e.g., laptop, smartphone, etc. have characteristic behaviors while surfing the Web. Profiling this behavior can help identify the person using a given device. In this paper, we introduce a technique to profile…
Browser fingerprinting is a pervasive online tracking technique used increasingly often for profiling and targeted advertising. Prior research on the prevalence of fingerprinting heavily relied on automated web crawls, which inherently…
An extensive body of research deals with estimating the correlation and the Hurst parameter of Internet traffic traces. The significance of these statistics is due to their fundamental impact on network performance. The coverage of Internet…
Browser fingerprinting can be used to identify and track users across the Web, even without cookies, by collecting attributes from users' devices to create unique "fingerprints". This technique and resulting privacy risks have been studied…
Recent work in traffic analysis has shown that traffic patterns leaked through side channels can be used to recover important semantic information. For instance, attackers can find out which website, or which page on a website, a user is…
How easy is it to uniquely identify a person based solely on their web browsing behavior? Here we show that when people navigate the Web, their online traces produce fingerprints that identify them. Merely the four most visited web domains…
Personalization despite being an effective solution to the problem information overload remains tricky on account of multiple dimensions to consider. Furthermore, the challenge of avoiding overdoing personalization involves estimation of a…
Web traffic is a valuable data source, typically used in the marketing space to track brand awareness and advertising effectiveness. However, web traffic is also a rich source of information for cybersecurity monitoring efforts. To better…
The sharing of network traces is an important prerequisite for the development and evaluation of efficient anomaly detection mechanisms. Unfortunately, privacy concerns and data protection laws prevent network operators from sharing these…
Recent advances in web technologies make it more difficult than ever to detect and block web tracking systems. In this work, we propose ASTrack, a novel approach to web tracking detection and removal. ASTrack uses an abstraction of the code…
Modern browsers give access to several attributes that can be collected to form a browser fingerprint. Although browser fingerprints have primarily been studied as a web tracking tool, they can contribute to improve the current state of web…
Several recent studies have demonstrated that people show large behavioural uniqueness. This has serious privacy implications as most individuals become increasingly re-identifiable in large datasets or can be tracked while they are…
Website fingerprinting enables an attacker to infer which web page a client is browsing through encrypted or anonymized network connections. We present a new website fingerprinting technique based on random decision forests and evaluate…
With the popularity of smartphones, mobile applications (apps) have penetrated the daily life of people. Although apps provide rich functionalities, they also access a large amount of personal information simultaneously. As a result,…
We examine the properties of all HTTP requests generated by a thousand undergraduates over a span of two months. Preserving user identity in the data set allows us to discover novel properties of Web traffic that directly affect models of…
The collapse of social contexts has been amplified by digital infrastructures but surprisingly received insufficient attention from Web privacy scholars. Users are persistently identified within and across distinct Web contexts, in varying…
The overturning of the Internet Privacy Rules by the Federal Communications Commissions (FCC) in late March 2017 allows Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to collect, share and sell their customers' Web browsing data without their consent.…
User privacy can be compromised by matching user data traces to records of their previous behavior. The matching of the statistical characteristics of traces to prior user behavior has been widely studied. However, an adversary can also…
The exponential growth in smartphone adoption is contributing to the availability of vast amounts of human behavioral data. This data enables the development of increasingly accurate data-driven user models that facilitate the delivery of…
Recent works showed that websites can detect browser extensions that users install and websites they are logged into. This poses significant privacy risks, since extensions and Web logins that reflect user's behavior, can be used to…