Related papers: Tracking Users across the Web via TLS Session Resu…
Standard Time-to-Live (TTL) cache management prescribes the storage of entire files, or possibly fractions thereof, for a given amount of time after a request. As a generalization of this approach, this work proposes the storage of a…
We perform an analysis of the way individual users navigate in the Web. We focus primarily in the temporal patterns of they return to a given page. The return probability as a function of time as well as the distribution of time intervals…
Research on mobile phone use often starts with a question of "How much time users spend on using their phones?". The question involves an equal-length measure that captures the duration of mobile phone use but does not tackle the other…
Large-scale collection of human behavioral data by companies raises serious privacy concerns. We show that behavior captured in the form of application usage data collected from smartphones is highly unique even in very large datasets…
The Domain Name System (DNS) is central to all Internet user activity, resolving accessed domain names into Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. As a result, curious DNS resolvers can learn everything about Internet users' interests. Public…
Parallelization is featured by DNS recursive servers to do time-consuming recursions on behalf on clients. As common DNS configurations, recursive servers should allow a reasonable timeout for each recursion which may take as long as…
Tor and hidden services have emerged as a practical solution to protect user privacy against tracking and censorship. At the same time, little is known about the lifetime and nature of hidden services. Data collection and study of Tor…
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…
Online tracking is a whack-a-mole game between trackers who build and monetize behavioral user profiles through intrusive data collection, and anti-tracking mechanisms, deployed as a browser extension, built-in to the browser, or as a DNS…
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…
Aiming to help people conduct online research tasks, much research has gone into tools for searching for, collecting, organizing, and synthesizing online information. However, outside of the lab, in-the-wild sensemaking sessions (with data…
Long-term tracking requires extreme stability to the multitude of model updates and robustness to the disappearance and loss of the target as such will inevitably happen. For motivation, we have taken 10 randomly selected OTB-sequences,…
In recent years, European regulators have debated restricting the time an online tracker can track a user to protect consumer privacy better. Despite the significance of these debates, there has been a noticeable absence of any…
For users navigating travel e-commerce websites, the process of researching products and making a purchase often results in intricate browsing patterns that span numerous sessions over an extended period of time. The resulting clickstream…
This paper summarizes selected results of the dissertation "Beobachtungsm\"oglichkeiten im Domain Name System: Angriffe auf die Privatsph\"are und Techniken zum Selbstdatenschutz". The dissertation provides new technical insights to answer…
Getting deeper insights into the online browsing behavior of Web users has been a major research topic since the advent of the WWW. It provides useful information to optimize website design, Web browser design, search engines offerings, and…
User data is the primary input of digital advertising, fueling the free Internet as we know it. As a result, web companies invest a lot in elaborate tracking mechanisms to acquire user data that can sell to data markets and advertisers.…
With more than 500 million daily tweets from over 330 million active users, Twitter constantly attracts malicious users aiming to carry out phishing and malware-related attacks against its user base. It therefore becomes of paramount…
The present paper introduces a novel approach to studying social media habits through predictive modeling of sequential smartphone user behaviors. While much of the literature on media and technology habits has relied on self-report…
An increasing amount of Internet traffic has its content encrypted. We address the question of whether it is possible to predict the activities taking place over an encrypted channel, in particular Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol. We…