Related papers: Third-party Service Dependencies and Centralizatio…
Knowing customer's interests, e.g. which Video-On-Demand (VoD) or Social Network services they are using, helps telecommunication companies with better network planning to enhance the performance exactly where the customer's interests lie,…
SSL/TLS is a fundamental technology in the network protocol stack that enables encrypted data transmission and authentication of web domains. However, the current model relies on a small number of Certificate Authorities (CAs) to provide…
Third-party web tracking is a common, and broadly used technique on the Web. Almost every step of users' is tracked, analyzed, and later used in different use cases (e.g., online advertisement). Different defense mechanisms have emerged to…
This paper explores tracking and privacy risks on pornography websites. Our analysis of 22,484 pornography websites indicated that 93% leak user data to a third party. Tracking on these sites is highly concentrated by a handful of major…
Dependability is an important characteristic that a trustworthy computer system should have. It is a measure of Availability, Reliability, Maintainability, Safety and Security. The focus of our research is on security of web services. Web…
Almost all popular Internet services are hosted in a select set of countries, forcing other nations to rely on international connectivity to access them. We infer instances where traffic towards a large portion of a country is serviced by a…
The web is global, but privacy laws differ by country. Which set of privacy rules do websites follow? We empirically study this question by detecting and analyzing cookie notices in an automated way. We crawl 1,500 European, American, and…
Ever since the web began, the number of websites has been growing exponentially. These websites cover an ever-increasing range of online services that fill a variety of social and economic functions across a growing range of industries. Yet…
Content delivery networks (CDN) contribute more than 50% of today's Internet traffic. Meta-CDNs, an evolution of centrally controlled CDNs, promise increased flexibility by multihoming content. So far, efforts to understand the…
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 recently introduced General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires that when obtaining information online that could be used to identify individuals, their consents must be obtained. Among other things, this affects many common…
Recent years have witnessed growing consolidation of web operations. For example, the majority of web traffic now originates from a few organizations, and even micro-websites often choose to host on large pre-existing cloud infrastructures.…
The treatment of Internet traffic is increasingly affected by national policies that require the ISPs in a country to adopt common protocols or practices. Examples include government enforced censorship, wiretapping, and protocol deployment…
The Domain Name System (DNS) is part of critical internet infrastructure, as DNS is invoked whenever a remote server is accessed (an URL is visited, an API request is made, etc.) by any application. DNS queries are served in hierarchical…
Now no web search engine can cover more than 60 percent of all the pages on Internet. The update interval of most pages database is almost one month. This condition hasn't changed for many years. Converge and recency problems have become…
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…
We performed a large-scale crawl of the World Wide Web, covering 6.9 Million domains and 57 Million subdomains, including all high-traffic sites of the Internet. We present a study of the correlations found between quantities measuring the…
A dominant regulatory model for web privacy is "notice and choice". In this model, users are notified of data collection and provided with options to control it. To examine the efficacy of this approach, this study presents the first…
The Net Neutrality issue has been at the center of debate worldwide lately. Some countries have established laws so that principles of Net Neutrality are respected, the Netherlands being the latest country in Europe. Among the questions…
DNS is a basic Internet service which almost all other user services depend on. However, what has been perceived in practice are a lot of inconsistencies and errors in the configuration of servers that cause different problems. The majority…