Related papers: Understanding and Mitigating the Security Risks of…
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…
Web applications are becoming more ubiquitous. All manner of physical devices are now connected and often have a variety of web applications and web-interfaces. This proliferation of web applications has been accompanied by an increase in…
Smart environments integrate Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) into devices, vehicles, buildings and cities to offer an increased quality of life, energy efficiency and economical sustainability. In this perspective, the…
With the increasing popularity of plugin-based software systems, ensuring the security of plugins has become a critical concern. When users install plugins or browse websites with plugins from an untrusted source, how can we be sure that…
The protection of cyber Intellectual Property (IP) such as web content is an increasingly critical concern. The rise of large language models (LLMs) with online retrieval capabilities enables convenient access to information but often…
This article attempts to discover the surreptitious features of ransomware and to address it in information systems security research. It intends to elicit attention with regard to ransomware, a newly emerged cyber threat using such…
Part of what makes the web successful is that anyone can publish content and browsers maintain certain safety guarantees. For example, it's safe to travel between links and make other trust decisions on the web because users can always…
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…
Thanks to the advance of technology, all kinds of applications are becoming more complete and capable of performing complex tasks that save much of our time. But to perform these tasks, applications require that some personal information…
Cybersecurity incidents such as data breaches have become increasingly common, affecting millions of users and organizations worldwide. The complexity of cybersecurity threats challenges the effectiveness of existing security communication…
One of the main challenges faced by a user today is protecting their privacy, especially during widespread surveil- lance. This led to the development of privacy infrastructures whose main purpose is to guarantee users privacy. However,…
With web applications becoming a preferred method of presenting graphical user interfaces to users, software vulnerabilities affecting web applications are becoming more and more prevalent and devastating. Some of these vulnerabilities,…
Web-use agents are rapidly being deployed to automate complex web tasks with extensive browser capabilities. However, these capabilities create a critical and previously unexplored attack surface. This paper demonstrates how attackers can…
The use of secure connections using HTTPS as the default means, or even the only means, to connect to web servers is increasing. It is being pushed from both sides: from the bottom up by client distributions and plugins, and from the top…
The openness and accessibility of the Web has contributed greatly to its worldwide adoption. Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) are used for resource identification on the Web. A resource on the Web can be described in many ways, which…
Free content websites that provide free books, music, games, movies, etc., have existed on the Internet for many years. While it is a common belief that such websites might be different from premium websites providing the same content…
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…
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,…
Current best practices heavily control user permissions on network systems. This effectively mitigates many insider threats regarding the collection and exfiltration of data. Many methods of covert communication involve crafting custom…
Browser agents enable autonomous web interaction but face critical reliability and security challenges in production. This paper presents findings from building and operating a production browser agent. The analysis examines where current…