Related papers: ProxyTorrent: Untangling the Free HTTP(S) Proxy Ec…
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…
The Tor anonymity system provides online privacy for millions of users, but it is slower than typical web browsing. To improve Tor performance, we propose PredicTor, a path selection technique that uses a Random Forest classifier trained on…
Censorship of the Internet is widespread around the world. As access to the web becomes increasingly ubiquitous, filtering of this resource becomes more pervasive. Transparency about specific content that citizens are denied access to is…
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…
Popular large language model (LLM) chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude require users to create an account with an email or a phone number before allowing full access to their services. This practice ties users' personally identifiable…
The Tor anonymity network is difficult to measure because, if not done carefully, measurements could risk the privacy (and potentially the safety) of the network's users. Recent work has proposed the use of differential privacy and secure…
Tor is among most well-known dark net in the world. It has noble uses, including as a platform for free speech and information dissemination under the guise of true anonymity, but may be culturally better known as a conduit for criminal…
With the shift to working remotely after the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) around the world has nearly doubled. Therefore, measuring the traffic and security aspects of the VPN ecosystem is more important now…
With the evolution of the online advertisement and tracking ecosystem, content-filtering has become the reference tool for improving the security, privacy and browsing experience when surfing the Internet. It is also commonly believed that…
A sequence number checking technique is proposed to improve the performance of TCP connections in mobile ad hoc networks. While a TCP connection is initialized, a routing protocol takes the responsibility for checking the hop count between…
Tor hidden services allow running Internet services while protecting the location of the servers. Their main purpose is to enable freedom of speech even in situations in which powerful adversaries try to suppress it. However, providing…
A large number of URLs are made public by various platforms for security analysis, archiving, and paste sharing -- such as VirusTotal, URLScan.io, Hybrid Analysis, the Wayback Machine, and RedHunt. These services may unintentionally expose…
Internet censorship is enforced by numerous governments worldwide, however, due to the lack of publicly available information, as well as the inherent risks of performing active measurements, it is often hard for the research community to…
The domain name system (DNS) is a crucial backbone of the Internet and millions of new domains are created on a daily basis. While the vast majority of these domains are legitimate, adversaries also register new hostnames to carry out…
A common approach when setting up a website is to utilize third party Web hosting and content delivery networks. Without taking this trend into account, any measurement study inspecting the deployment and operation of websites can be…
This article provides a quantitative analysis of privacy-compromising mechanisms on 1 million popular websites. Findings indicate that nearly 9 in 10 websites leak user data to parties of which the user is likely unaware; more than 6 in 10…
Our goal is to empirically discover how censors react to the introduction of new proxy servers that can be used to circumvent their information controls. We examine a specific case, that of obfuscated Tor bridges, and conduct experiments…
Censors of the Internet must continually discover and block new circumvention proxy servers. We seek to understand this process; specifically, the length of the delay between when a proxy first becomes discoverable and when it is actually…
Crowdsourcing platforms offer a way to label data by aggregating answers of multiple unqualified workers. We introduce a \textit{simple} and \textit{budget efficient} crowdsourcing method named Proxy Crowdsourcing (PCS). PCS collects…
We present measurements showing that the top one million most popular Web domains are reachable within 13ms (in the median) from a collective of just 12 cloud data centers. We explore the consequences of this Web "consolidation", focusing…