Related papers: COOKIEGUARD: Characterizing and Isolating the Firs…
Web services commonly employ Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) for performance and security. As web traffic is becoming 100% HTTPS, more and more websites allow CDNs to terminate their HTTPS connections. This practice may expose a…
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…
Trigger-Action platforms are an emerging class of web-based systems that enable users to create automation rules (or recipes) of the form, "If there is a smoke alarm, then turn off my oven." These platforms stitch together various online…
Web developers routinely rely on third-party Java-Script libraries such as jQuery to enhance the functionality of their sites. However, if not properly maintained, such dependencies can create attack vectors allowing a site to be…
The presence of third-party tracking on websites has become customary. However, our understanding of the third-party ecosystem is still very rudimentary. We examine third-party trackers from a geographical perspective, observing the…
Misconfigurations and outdated software are a major cause of compromised websites and data leaks. Past research has proposed and evaluated sending automated security notifications to the operators of misconfigured websites, but encountered…
The rise of ad-blockers is viewed as an economic threat by online publishers, especially those who primarily rely on ad- vertising to support their services. To address this threat, publishers have started retaliating by employing ad-block…
Adblocking tools like Adblock Plus continue to rise in popularity, potentially threatening the dynamics of advertising revenue streams. In response, a number of publishers have ramped up efforts to develop and deploy mechanisms for…
Cayley hash functions are based on a simple idea of using a pair of semigroup elements, A and B, to hash the 0 and 1 bit, respectively, and then to hash an arbitrary bit string in the natural way, by using multiplication of elements in the…
Website fingerprinting enables an attacker to infer which web page a client is browsing through encrypted or anonymized network connections. We present a new website fingerprinting technique based on random decision forests and evaluate…
Mobile devices that connect to the Internet via cellular networks are rapidly becoming the primary medium for accessing Web content. Cellular service providers (CSPs) commonly deploy Web proxies and other middleboxes for security,…
Cookie banners, the pop ups that appear to collect your consent for data collection, are a tempting ground for dark patterns. Dark patterns are design elements that are used to influence the user's choice towards an option that is not in…
The QUIC protocol is now widely adopted by major tech companies and accounts for a significant fraction of today's Internet traffic. QUIC's multiplexing capabilities, encrypted headers, dynamic IP address changes, and encrypted parameter…
The ongoing deprecation of third-party cookies by web browser vendors has sparked the proposal of alternative methods to support more privacy-preserving personalized advertising on web browsers and applications. The Topics API is being…
Website Fingerprinting (WF) attacks exploit patterns in encrypted traffic to infer the websites visited by users, posing a serious threat to anonymous communication systems. Although recent WF techniques achieve over 90% accuracy in…
With the rapid increase in online interactions, concerns over data privacy and transparency of data processing practices have become more pronounced. While regulations like the GDPR have driven the widespread adoption of cookie banners in…
Differential privacy offers formal quantitative guarantees for algorithms over datasets, but it assumes attackers that know and can influence all but one record in the database. This assumption often vastly overapproximates the attackers'…
Websites are capable of learning a wide range of information about the platform on which a browser is executing. One major source of such information is the set of standardised Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) provided within the…
In recent years, European regulators have debated restricting the time an online tracker can track a user to protect consumer privacy better. Despite the significance of these debates, there has been a noticeable absence of any…
Dark patterns are (evil) design nudges that steer people's behaviour through persuasive interface design. Increasingly found in cookie consent requests, they possibly undermine principles of EU privacy law. In two preregistered online…