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On today's Web, users trade access to their private data for content and services. Advertising sustains the business model of many websites and applications. Efficient and successful advertising relies on predicting users' actions and…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2016-05-25 Silvia Puglisi , David Rebollo-Monedero , Jordi Forné

The Tor network provides users with strong anonymity by routing their internet traffic through multiple relays. While Tor encrypts traffic and hides IP addresses, it remains vulnerable to traffic analysis attacks such as the website…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Yuwen Cui , Guangjing Wang , Khanh Vu , Kai Wei , Kehan Shen , Zhengyuan Jiang , Xiao Han , Ning Wang , Zhuo Lu , Yao Liu

Modern web browsers are incredibly complex, with millions of lines of code and over one thousand JavaScript functions and properties available to website authors. This work investigates how these browser features are used on the modern,…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2016-05-23 Peter Snyder , Lara Ansari , Cynthia Taylor , Chris Kanich

In the early days of the web, giving the same web page to different browsers could provide very different results. As the rendering engine behind each browser would differ, some elements of a page could break or be positioned in the wrong…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-11-20 Jean Luc Intumwayase , Imane Fouad , Pierre Laperdrix , Romain Rouvoy

Third-party tracking is common on almost all commercially operated websites. Prior work has studied in detail the extent of third-party tracking on the web, detection of third-party trackers, and defending against third-party tracking.…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2019-11-18 Matius Chairani , Mathieu Chevalley , Abderrahmane Lazraq , Sruti Bhagavatula

Recent studies have shown that Tor onion (hidden) service websites are particularly vulnerable to website fingerprinting attacks due to their limited number and sensitive nature. In this work we present a multi-level feature analysis of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2017-09-22 Rebekah Overdorf , Marc Juarez , Gunes Acar , Rachel Greenstadt , Claudia Diaz

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Ido Sivan-Sevilla , Parthav Poudel

Website Fingerprinting (WFP) has traditionally focused on inferring which website a user visits from encrypted traffic metadata such as packet sizes and timing. In this paper, we identify and quantify a new privacy risk in modern web…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Chuxu Song , Hao Wang , Richard Martin

Web browsers provide a user-friendly means of navigating the web. Users rely on their web browser to provide information about the websites they are visiting, such as the security state. Browsers also provide a user interface (UI) with…

Digital Libraries · Computer Science 2021-04-28 Abigail Mabe

The major mobile platforms, Android and iOS, have introduced changes that restrict user tracking to improve user privacy, yet apps continue to covertly track users via device fingerprinting. We study the opportunity to improve this dynamic…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Alex Berke , Güliz Seray Tuncay , Michael Specter , Mihai Christodorescu

In webpage fingerprinting, an on-path adversary infers the specific webpage loaded by a victim user by analysing the patterns in the encrypted TLS traffic exchanged between the user's browser and the website's servers. This work studies…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Vasilios Mavroudis , Jamie Hayes

The increasing use of encrypted data within file storage and in network communications leaves investigators with many challenges. One of the most challenging is the Tor protocol, as its main focus is to protect the privacy of the user, in…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-07-25 Matt Muir , Petra Leimich , William J Buchanan

Browser fingerprinting aims to identify users or their devices, through scripts that execute in the users' browser and collect information on software or hardware characteristics. It is used to track users or as an additional means 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…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2021-05-05 Luca Vassio , Idilio Drago , Marco Mellia , Zied Ben Houidi , Mohamed Lamine Lamali

Accurately analyzing and modeling online browsing behavior play a key role in understanding users and technology interactions. In this work, we design and conduct a user study to collect browsing data from 31 participants continuously for…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2021-08-17 Yuliia Lut , Michael Wang , Elissa M. Redmiles , Rachel Cummings

This paper introduces adF, a novel system for analyzing the vulnerability of different devices, Operating Systems (OSes), and browsers to web fingerprinting. adF performs its measurements from code inserted in ads. We have used our system…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Miguel A. Bermejo-Agueda , Patricia Callejo , Rubén Cuevas , Ángel Cuevas

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Seyed Ali Akhavani , Engin Kirda , Amin Kharraz

Browser extensions are third party programs, tightly integrated to browsers, where they execute with elevated privileges in order to provide users with additional functionalities. Unlike web applications, extensions are not subject to the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-01-14 Dolière Francis Somé

Over the past years, advertisement companies have used various tracking methods to persistently track users across the web. Such tracking methods usually include first and third-party cookies, cookie synchronization, as well as a variety of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-03-29 Paschalis Bekos , Panagiotis Papadopoulos , Evangelos P. Markatos , Nicolas Kourtellis

Browser fingerprinting enables persistent cross-site user tracking via subtle techniques that often evade conventional defenses or cause website breakage when script-level blocking countermeasures are applied. Addressing these challenges…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-15 Pouneh Nikkhah Bahrami , Dylan Cutler , Igor Bilogrevic