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Browser fingerprinting can be used to identify and track users across the Web, even without cookies, by collecting attributes from users' devices to create unique "fingerprints". This technique and resulting privacy risks have been studied…
We present Tracking Protection in the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Tracking Protection is a new privacy technology to mitigate invasive tracking of users' online activity by blocking requests to tracking domains. We evaluate our approach…
Browser fingerprinting is a pervasive online tracking technique used increasingly often for profiling and targeted advertising. Prior research on the prevalence of fingerprinting heavily relied on automated web crawls, which inherently…
Device fingerprinting is a widely used technique that allows a third party to identify a particular device. Applications of device fingerprinting include authentication, attacker identification, or software license binding. Device…
While third-party cookies have been a key component of the digital marketing ecosystem for years, they allow users to be tracked across web sites in ways that raise serious privacy concerns. Google has proposed the Privacy Sandbox…
Today, many web advertising data flows involve passive cross-site tracking of users. Enabling such a mechanism through the usage of third party tracking cookies (3PC) exposes sensitive user data to a large number of parties, with little…
Website fingerprinting attacks, which use statistical analysis on network traffic to compromise user privacy, have been shown to be effective even if the traffic is sent over anonymity-preserving networks such as Tor. The classical attack…
We perform a large-scale analysis of third-party trackers on the World Wide Web from more than 3.5 billion web pages of the CommonCrawl 2012 corpus. We extract a dataset containing more than 140 million third-party embeddings in over 41…
Today, third-party JavaScript resources are indispensable part of the web platform. More than 88% of world's top websites include at least one JavaScript resource from a remote host. However, there is a great security risk behind using a…
Securing browsers in mobile devices is very challenging, because these browser apps usually provide browsing services to other apps in the same device. A malicious app installed in a device can potentially obtain sensitive information…
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…
Websites use third-party ads and tracking services to deliver targeted ads and collect information about users that visit them. These services put users' privacy at risk, and that is why users' demand for blocking these services is growing.…
Browser extensions are small applications executed in the browser context that provide additional capabilities and enrich the user experience while surfing the web. The acceptance of extensions in current browsers is unquestionable. For…
Various in-browser privacy protection techniques have been designed to protect end-users from third-party tracking. In an arms race against these counter-measures, the tracking providers developed a new technique called CNAME cloaking based…
In this paper, we address an unsolved problem in the real world: how to ensure the integrity of the web content in a browser in the presence of malicious browser extensions? The problem of exposing confidential user credentials to malicious…
The transparency and privacy behavior of mobile browsers has remained widely unexplored by the research community. In fact, as opposed to regular Android apps, mobile browsers may present contradicting privacy behaviors. On the one end,…
Cross Site Scripting (XSS) Flaws are currently the most popular security problems in modern web applications. These Flaws make use of vulnerabilities in the code of web-applications, resulting in serious consequences, such as theft of…
This paper performs a large-scale study of dependency chains in the web, to find that around 50% of first-party websites render content that they did not directly load. Although the majority (84.91%) of websites have short dependency chains…
Automated analysis of privacy policies has proved a fruitful research direction, with developments such as automated policy summarization, question answering systems, and compliance detection. Prior research has been limited to analysis of…
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…