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Modern Web APIs allow developers to provide extensively customized experiences for website visitors, but the richness of the device information they provide also make them vulnerable to being abused to construct browser fingerprints,…
Browsers and their users can be tracked even in the absence of a persistent IP address or cookie. Unique and hence identifying pieces of information, making up what is known as a fingerprint, can be collected from browsers by a visited…
Web browsers are a portal to the internet, where much of human activity is undertaken. Thus, there has been significant research work in AI agents that interact with the internet through web browsing. However, there is also another…
This paper presents a systematic evaluation of the privacy behaviors and attributes of eight recent, popular browser agents. Browser agents are software that automate Web browsing using large language models and ancillary tooling. However,…
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…
A fundamental tension exists between the demand for sophisticated AI assistance in web search and the need for user data privacy. Current centralized models require users to transmit sensitive browsing data to external services, which…
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…
The Chromium open-source project has become a fundamental piece of the Web as we know it today, with multiple vendors offering browsers based on its codebase. One of its most popular features is the possibility of altering or enhancing the…
Browser fingerprinting can be used to identify and track users across the Web, even without cookies, by collecting attributes from users' devices to create unique "fingerprints". This technique and resulting privacy risks have been studied…
Webextensions can improve web browser privacy, security, and user experience. The APIs offered by the browser to webextensions affect possible functionality. Currently, Chrome transitions to a modified set of APIs called Manifest v3. This…
Recent works showed that websites can detect browser extensions that users install and websites they are logged into. This poses significant privacy risks, since extensions and Web logins that reflect user's behavior, can be used to…
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…
Web browsers provide the security foundation for our online experiences. Significant research has been done into the security of browsers themselves, but relatively little investigation has been done into how they interact with the…
A Web API (WAPI) is a type of API whose interaction with its consumers is done through the Internet. While being accessed through the Internet can be challenging, mostly when WAPIs evolve, it gives providers the possibility to monitor their…
Although web applications evolved to mature solutions providing sophisticated user experience, they also became complex for the same reason. Complexity primarily affects the server-side generation of dynamic pages as they are aggregated…
The web browser is one of the major channels to access the Internet on mobile devices. Based on the smartphone usage logs from millions of real-world Android users, it is interesting to find that about 38% users have more than one browser…
Web traffic is a valuable data source, typically used in the marketing space to track brand awareness and advertising effectiveness. However, web traffic is also a rich source of information for cybersecurity monitoring efforts. To better…
A website browser cookie is a small file created by a web server upon visitation, which is placed in the user's browser directory to enhance the user's experience. However, first and third-party cookies have become a significant threat to…
Browser extensions are additional tools developed by third parties that integrate with web browsers to extend their functionality beyond standard capabilities. However, the browser extension platform is increasingly being exploited by…
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…