Related papers: Profiling user activities with minimal traffic tra…
Several studies have been conducted on understanding third-party user tracking on the web. However, web trackers can only track users on sites where they are embedded by the publisher, thus obtaining a fragmented view of a user's online…
Modern applications significantly enhance user experience by adapting to each user's individual condition and/or preferences. While this adaptation can greatly improve utility or be essential for the application to work (e.g., for…
Web pornography represents a large fraction of the Internet traffic, with thousands of websites and millions of users. Studying web pornography consumption allows understanding human behaviors and it is crucial for medical and psychological…
Profiling users for the purpose of targeted advertisements or other kinds of personalization is very popular on the internet. But besides the benefits of individually tailored news feeds and shopping recommendation research has shown that…
Internet traffic on a network link can be modeled as a stochastic process. After detecting and quantifying the properties of this process, using statistical tools, a series of mathematical models is developed, culminating in one that is…
The primary objective of an anonymity tool is to protect the anonymity of its users through the implementation of strong encryption and obfuscation techniques. As a result, it becomes very difficult to monitor and identify users activities…
Online tracking is a widespread practice on the web with questionable ethics, security, and privacy concerns. While web tracking can offer personalized and curated content to Internet users, it operates as a sophisticated surveillance…
In this paper, the Simulated Annealing (SA) based biclustering approach is proposed in which SA is used as an optimization tool for biclustering of web usage data to identify the optimal user profile from the given web usage data. Extracted…
Recently there has been much interest in graph-based learning, with applications in collaborative filtering for recommender networks, link prediction for social networks and fraud detection. These networks can consist of millions of…
Understanding how people interact with the web is key for a variety of applications, e.g., from the design of effective web pages to the definition of successful online marketing campaigns. Browsing behavior has been traditionally…
Browser fingerprinting is a relatively new method of uniquely identifying browsers that can be used to track web users. In some ways it is more privacy-threatening than tracking via cookies, as users have no direct control over it. A number…
Modern applications significantly enhance user experience by adapting to each user's individual condition and/or preferences. While this adaptation can greatly improve a user's experience or be essential for the application to work, the…
It is generally recognized that the traffic generated by an individual connected to a network acts as his biometric signature. Several tools exploit this fact to fingerprint and monitor users. Often, though, these tools assume to access the…
High-latency anonymous communication systems prevent passive eavesdroppers from inferring communicating partners with certainty. However, disclosure attacks allow an adversary to recover users' behavioral profiles when communications are…
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction plays a key role in modern online personalization services. In practice, it is necessary to capture user's drifting interests by modeling sequential user behaviors to build an accurate CTR prediction…
This articles surveys the existing literature on the methods currently used by web services to track the user online as well as their purposes, implications, and possible user's defenses. A significant majority of reviewed articles and web…
With the growing popularity and usage of online social media services, people now have accounts (some times several) on multiple and diverse services like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. Publicly available information can be used…
Modern phishing campaigns increasingly evade snapshot-based URL classifiers using interaction gates (e.g., checkbox/slider challenges), delayed content rendering, and logo-less credential harvesters. This shifts URL triage from static…
Users' website browsing history contains sensitive information, like health conditions, political interests, financial situations, etc. Some recent studies have demonstrated the possibility of inferring website fingerprints based on…
Online services such as web search and e-commerce applications typically rely on the collection of data about users, including details of their activities on the web. Such personal data is used to enhance the quality of service via…