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Existing web agent benchmarks have largely converged on short, single-site tasks that frontier models are approaching saturation on. However, real world web use consists of long-horizon, multi-site workflows. Common web navigation tasks,…
Domain lists are a key ingredient for representative censuses of the Web. Unfortunately, such censuses typically lack a view on domains under country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs). This introduces unwanted bias: many countries have a rich…
We present proppy, the first publicly available real-world, real-time propaganda detection system for online news, which aims at raising awareness, thus potentially limiting the impact of propaganda and helping fight disinformation. The…
In recent years, there are some major changes in the way content is being distributed over the network. The content distribution techniques have recently started to embrace peer-to-peer (P2P) systems as an alternative to the traditional…
Modern web applications rely heavily on client-side API calls to fetch data, render content, and communicate with backend services. However, the quality of these network interactions (redundant requests, missing cache headers, oversized…
Third party tracking is the practice by which third parties recognize users accross different websites as they browse the web. Recent studies show that 90% of websites contain third party content that is tracking its users across the web.…
During disasters, crisis, and emergencies the public relies on online services provided by official authorities to receive timely alerts, trustworthy information, and access to relief programs. It is therefore crucial for the authorities to…
Many online services rely on self-reported locations of user devices like smartphones. To mitigate harm from falsified self-reported locations, the literature has proposed location proof services (LPSs), which provide proof of a device's…
Since 2006, Turkmenistan has been listed as one of the few Internet enemies by Reporters without Borders due to its extensively censored Internet and strictly regulated information control policies. Existing reports of filtering in…
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…
Bitswap is the data exchange protocol for the content-addressed peer-to-peer overlay network IPFS. During content discovery, Bitswap reveals the interest of a peer in content to all neighbors, enabling the tracking of user interests. In our…
With large-scale adaption to biometric based applications, security and privacy of biometrics is utmost important especially when operating in unsupervised online mode. This work proposes a novel approach for generating new artificial…
A powerful means to help users discover new content in the overwhelming amount of information available today is sharing in online communities such as social networks or crowdsourced platforms. This means comes short in the case of what we…
Toll scams involve criminals registering fake domains that pretend to be legitimate transportation agencies to trick users into making fraudulent payments. Although these scams are rapidly increasing and causing significant harm, they have…
Revelations of large scale electronic surveillance and data mining by governments and corporations have fueled increased adoption of HTTPS. We present a traffic analysis attack against over 6000 webpages spanning the HTTPS deployments of 10…
Growth in technology has resulted in the large-scale collection and processing of Personally Identifiable Information by organizations that run digital services such as websites, which led to the emergence of new legislation to regulate PII…
Tor and I2P are well-known anonymity networks used by many individuals to protect their online privacy and anonymity. Tor's centralized directory services facilitate the understanding of the Tor network, as well as the measurement and…
Dark web crawling is a complex process that involves specific methodologies and techniques to navigate the Tor network and extract data from hidden services. This study proposes a general dark web crawler designed to extract pages handling…
HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) serves to protect websites from certain attacks by allowing web servers to inform browsers that only secure HTTPS connections should be used. However, this still leaves the initial connection unsecured…
We develop a means to detect ongoing per-country anomalies in the daily usage metrics of the Tor anonymous communication network, and demonstrate the applicability of this technique to identifying likely periods of internet censorship and…