TY - GEN
T1 - WebRanz
T2 - 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, FSE 2016
AU - Wang, Weihang
AU - Zheng, Yunhui
AU - Xing, Xinyu
AU - Kwon, Yonghwi
AU - Zhang, Xiangyu
AU - Eugster, Patrick
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 ACM.
PY - 2016/11/1
Y1 - 2016/11/1
N2 - Nowadays, a rapidly increasing number of web users are using Ad-blockers to block online advertisements. Ad-blockers are browser-based software that can block most Ads on the websites, speeding up web browsers and saving bandwidth. Despite these benefits to end users, Ad-blockers could be catastrophic for the economic structure underlying the web, especially considering the rise of Ad-blocking as well as the number of technologies and services that rely exclusively on Ads to compensate their cost. In this paper, we introduce WebRanz that utilizes a randomization mechanism to circumvent Ad-blocking. Using WebRanz, content publishers can constantly mutate the internal HTML elements and element attributes of their web pages, without afiecting their visual appearances and functionalities. Randomization invalidates the pre-defined patterns that Ad-blockers use to filter out Ads. Though the design of WebRanz is motivated by evading Ad-blockers, WebRanz also benefits the defense against bot scripts. We evaluate the effectiveness of WebRanz and its overhead using 221 randomly sampled top Alexa web pages and 8 representative bot scripts.
AB - Nowadays, a rapidly increasing number of web users are using Ad-blockers to block online advertisements. Ad-blockers are browser-based software that can block most Ads on the websites, speeding up web browsers and saving bandwidth. Despite these benefits to end users, Ad-blockers could be catastrophic for the economic structure underlying the web, especially considering the rise of Ad-blocking as well as the number of technologies and services that rely exclusively on Ads to compensate their cost. In this paper, we introduce WebRanz that utilizes a randomization mechanism to circumvent Ad-blocking. Using WebRanz, content publishers can constantly mutate the internal HTML elements and element attributes of their web pages, without afiecting their visual appearances and functionalities. Randomization invalidates the pre-defined patterns that Ad-blockers use to filter out Ads. Though the design of WebRanz is motivated by evading Ad-blockers, WebRanz also benefits the defense against bot scripts. We evaluate the effectiveness of WebRanz and its overhead using 221 randomly sampled top Alexa web pages and 8 representative bot scripts.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84997216916&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84997216916&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2950290.2950352
DO - 10.1145/2950290.2950352
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84997216916
T3 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
SP - 205
EP - 216
BT - FSE 2016 - Proceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering
A2 - Su, Zhendong
A2 - Zimmermann, Thomas
A2 - Cleland-Huang, Jane
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 13 November 2016 through 18 November 2016
ER -