Related papers: COOKIEGUARD: Characterizing and Isolating the Firs…
Modern web browsers have effectively become the new operating system for business applications, yet their security posture is often under-scrutinized. This paper presents a novel, comprehensive Browser Security Posture Analysis…
Modern Web APIs allow developers to provide extensively customized experiences for website visitors, but the richness of the device information they provide also make them vulnerable to being abused to construct browser fingerprints,…
While advertising has become commonplace in today's online interactions, there is a notable dearth of research investigating the extent to which browser fingerprinting is harnessed for user tracking and targeted advertising. Prior studies…
Websites with hyper-partisan, left or right-leaning focus offer content that is typically biased towards the expectations of their target audience. Such content often polarizes users, who are repeatedly primed to specific (extreme) content,…
Password managers provide significant security benefits to users. However, malicious client-side scripts and browser extensions can steal passwords after the manager has autofilled them into the web page. In this paper, we extend prior work…
Over the past years, advertisement companies have used various tracking methods to persistently track users across the web. Such tracking methods usually include first and third-party cookies, cookie synchronization, as well as a variety of…
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…
Real-time, online-editing web apps provide free and convenient services for collaboratively editing, sharing and storing files. The benefits of these web applications do not come for free: not only do service providers have full access to…
JavaScript, a scripting language employed to augment the capabilities of web browsers within web pages or browser extensions, utilizes code segments termed JavaScript inclusions. While the security aspects of JavaScript inclusions in web…
Current best practices heavily control user permissions on network systems. This effectively mitigates many insider threats regarding the collection and exfiltration of data. Many methods of covert communication involve crafting custom…
In 2020, Google announced it would disable third-party cookies in the Chrome browser to improve user privacy. In order to continue to enable interest-based advertising while mitigating risks of individualized user tracking, Google proposed…
A core problem in the development and maintenance of crowd-sourced filter lists is that their maintainers cannot confidently predict whether (and where) a new filter list rule will break websites. This is a result of enormity of the Web,…
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…
How did we get from a world where cookies were something you ate and where "non-techies" were unaware of "Netscape cookies" to a world where cookies are a hot-button privacy issue for many computer users? This paper will describe how HTTP…
Open access WiFi hotspots are widely deployed in many public places, including restaurants, parks, coffee shops, shopping malls, trains, airports, hotels, and libraries. While these hotspots provide an attractive option to stay connected,…
Third-party Software Development Kits (SDKs) are widely adopted in Android app development, to effortlessly accelerate development pipelines and enhance app functionality. However, this convenience raises substantial concerns about…
Browser fingerprinting is a stateless identification technique based on browser properties. Together, they form an identifier that can be collected without users' notice and has been studied to be unique and stable. As this technique relies…
Web tracking has been extensively studied over the last decade. To detect tracking, previous studies and user tools rely on filter lists. However, it has been shown that filter lists miss trackers. In this paper, we propose an alternative…
Recent developments in online tracking make it harder for individuals to detect and block trackers. Some sites have deployed indirect tracking methods, which attempt to uniquely identify a device by asking the browser to perform a…
The paper analyses current versions of top three used Internet browsers and compare their security levels to a research done in 2006. The security is measured by analyzing how user data is stored. Data recorded during different browsing…