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  4. WEBGRAPH: Capturing Advertising and Tracking Information Flows for Robust Blocking
 
conference paper

WEBGRAPH: Capturing Advertising and Tracking Information Flows for Robust Blocking

Siby, Sandra  
•
Iqbal, Umar
•
Englehardt, Steven
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January 1, 2022
Proceedings Of The 31St Usenix Security Symposium
31st USENIX Security Symposium

Users rely on ad and tracker blocking tools to protect their privacy. Unfortunately, existing ad and tracker blocking tools are susceptible to mutable advertising and tracking content. In this paper, we first demonstrate that a state-of-the-art ad and tracker blocker, ADGRAPH, is susceptible to such adversarial evasion techniques that are currently deployed on the web. Second, we introduce WEBGRAPH, the first ML-based ad and tracker blocker that detects ads and trackers based on their action rather than their content. By featurizing the actions that are fundamental to advertising and tracking information flows - e.g., storing an identifier in the browser or sharing an identifier with another tracker - WEB GRAPH performs nearly as well as prior approaches, but is significantly more robust to adversarial evasions. In particular, we show that WEBGRAPH achieves comparable accuracy to ADGRAPH, while significantly decreasing the success rate of an adversary from near-perfect for ADGRAPH to around 8% for WEBGRAPH. Finally, we show that WEB GRAPH remains robust to sophisticated adversaries that use adversarial evasion techniques beyond those currently deployed on the web.

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Type
conference paper
Web of Science ID

WOS:000855237504012

Author(s)
Siby, Sandra  
Iqbal, Umar
Englehardt, Steven
Shafiq, Zubair
Troncoso, Carmela  
Date Issued

2022-01-01

Publisher

USENIX ASSOC

Publisher place

Berkeley

Published in
Proceedings Of The 31St Usenix Security Symposium
ISBN of the book

978-1-939133-31-1

Start page

2875

End page

2892

Subjects

Computer Science, Information Systems

•

Computer Science, Theory & Methods

•

Computer Science

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
SPRING  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
31st USENIX Security Symposium

Boston, MA

Aug 10-12, 2022

Available on Infoscience
November 7, 2022
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/191982
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