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With its critical role in business and service delivery through mobile devices, SMS (Short Message Service) has long been abused for spamming, which is still on the rise today possibly due to the emergence of A2P bulk messaging. The effort…
A large part of modern day communications are carried out through the medium of E-mails, especially corporate communications. More and more people are using E-mail for personal uses too. Companies also send notifications to their customers…
Rich offline experience, periodic background sync, push notification functionality, network requests control, improved performance via requests caching are only a few of the functionalities provided by the Service Worker (SW) API. This new…
With over 3 billion users globally, mobile instant messaging apps have become indispensable for both personal and professional communication. Besides plain messaging, many services implement additional features such as delivery and read…
Modern software development frequently uses third-party packages, raising the concern of supply chain security attacks. Many attackers target popular package managers, like npm, and their users with supply chain attacks. In 2021 there was a…
Smishing, also known as SMS phishing, is a type of fraudulent communication in which an attacker disguises SMS communications to deceive a target into providing their sensitive data. Smishing attacks use a variety of tactics; however, they…
Many internet ventures rely on advertising for their revenue. However, users feel discontent by the presence of ads on the websites they visit, as the data-size of ads is often comparable to that of the actual content. This has an impact…
Advertisement drives the economy of the mobile app ecosystem. As a key component in the mobile ad business model, mobile ad content has been overlooked by the research community, which poses a number of threats, e.g., propagating malware…
Due to the involvement of multiple intermediaries without trusted parties, lack of proper regulations, and a complicated supply chain, ad impression discrepancy affects online advertising. This issue causes up to $82 billion annual revenue…
The domain name system (DNS) is a crucial backbone of the Internet and millions of new domains are created on a daily basis. While the vast majority of these domains are legitimate, adversaries also register new hostnames to carry out…
Modern web applications are dominated by HTTP/HTTPS messages that consist of one or more headers, where most of the exploits and payloads can be injected by attackers. According to the OWASP, the 80 percent of the web attacks are done…
The advance of smartphones and cellular networks boosts the need of mobile advertising and targeted marketing. However, it also triggers the unseen security threats. We found that the phone scams with fake calling numbers of very short…
Domain fronting is a network communication technique that involves leveraging (or abusing) content delivery networks (CDNs) to disguise the final destination of network packets by presenting them as if they were intended for a different…
Funding the production of quality online content is a pressing problem for content producers. The most common funding method, online advertising, is rife with well-known performance and privacy harms, and an intractable subject-agent…
Short Message Service (SMS) is a popular channel for online service providers to verify accounts and authenticate users registered to a particular service. Specialized applications, called Public SMS Gateways (PSGs), offer free Disposable…
Monetizing websites and web apps through online advertising is widespread in the web ecosystem. The online advertising ecosystem nowadays forces publishers to integrate ads from these third-party domains. On the one hand, this raises…
Virtual Private Network (VPN) solutions are used to connect private networks securely over the Internet. Besides their benefits in corporate environments, VPNs are also marketed to privacy-minded users to preserve their privacy, and to…
Recent years have seen a sharp rise in adblocker use, driven by increased web tracking and personalized ads. However, a significant issue for adblocker users is the web breakages they encounter, which worsens their browsing experience and…
Automated browsers are widely used to study the web at scale. Their premise is that they measure what regular browsers would encounter on the web. In practice, deviations due to detection of automation have been found. To what extent…
As an emerging service for in-browser content delivery, peer-assisted delivery network (PDN) is reported to offload up to 95\% of bandwidth consumption for video streaming, significantly reducing the cost incurred by traditional CDN…