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More users and companies make use of cloud services every day. They all expect a perfect performance and any issue to remain transparent to them. This last statement is very challenging to perform. A user's activities in our cloud can…
Phishing attacks are increasingly prevalent, with adversaries creating deceptive webpages to steal sensitive information. Despite advancements in machine learning and deep learning for phishing detection, attackers constantly develop new…
Millions of web users directly depend on ad and tracker blocking tools to protect their privacy. However, existing ad and tracker blockers fall short because of their reliance on trivially susceptible advertising and tracking content. In…
Content blocking is an important part of a performant, user-serving, privacy respecting web. Most content blockers build trust labels over URLs. While useful, this approach has well understood shortcomings. Attackers may avoid detection by…
Many tracking companies collect user data and sell it to data markets and advertisers. While they claim to protect user privacy by anonymizing the data, our research reveals that significant privacy risks persist even with anonymized data.…
Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) have been introduced as essential and popular security gates that inspect incoming HTTP traffic to filter out malicious requests and provide defenses against a diverse array of web-based threats. Evading…
Web tracking is an omnipresent phenomenon in today's web, affecting users in their day-to-day lives. Filter lists and blockers were invented to detect trackers and to protect users. Due to limitations of said tools, researchers developed…
In the view of massive content explosion in World Wide Web through diverse sources, it has become mandatory to have content filtering tools. The filtering of contents of the web pages holds greater significance in cases of access by…
`Tracking' is the collection of data about an individual's activity across multiple distinct contexts and the retention, use, or sharing of data derived from that activity outside the context in which it occurred. This paper aims to…
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…
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,…
Cybersquatting refers to the practice where attackers register a domain name similar to a legitimate one to confuse users for illegal gains. With the growth of the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) ecosystem, there are indications that…
Field data is an invaluable source of information for testers and developers because it witnesses how software systems operate in real environments, capturing scenarios and configurations relevant to end-users. Unfortunately, collecting…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly relying on web crawling to stay up to date and accurately answer user queries. These crawlers are expected to honor robots.txt files, which govern automated access. In this study, for the first…
Targeted advertising is fueled by the comprehensive tracking of users' online activity. As a result, advertising companies, such as Google and Meta, encourage website administrators to not only install tracking scripts on their websites but…
As third-party cookie blocking is becoming the norm in browsers, advertisers and trackers have started to use first-party cookies for tracking. We conduct a differential measurement study on 10K websites with third-party cookies allowed and…
This work investigates the potential of torrent metadata as a source for open-source intelligence (OSINT), with a focus on user profiling and behavioral analysis. While peer-to-peer (P2P) networks such as BitTorrent are well studied with…
Browser fingerprinting is an invasive and opaque stateless tracking technique. Browser vendors, academics, and standards bodies have long struggled to provide meaningful protections against browser fingerprinting that are both accurate and…
Phishing attacks are an increasingly potent web-based threat, with nearly 1.5 million websites created on a monthly basis. In this work, we present the first study towards identifying such attacks through phishing reports shared by users on…
Despite the numerous developments in object tracking, further development of current tracking algorithms is limited by small and mostly saturated datasets. As a matter of fact, data-hungry trackers based on deep-learning currently rely on…