All posts by Sheharbano Khattak

Adblocking and Counter-Blocking: A Slice of the Arms Race

Academic papers, Privacy technology, ,

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If you use an adblocker, you are probably familiar with messages of the kind shown above, asking you to either disable your adblocker, or to consider supporting the host website via a donation or subscription. This is the battle du jour in the ongoing adblocking arms race — and it’s one we explore in our new report Adblocking and Counter-Blocking: A Slice of the Arms Race.

The reasons for the rising popularity of adblockers include improved browsing experience, better privacy, and protection against malvertising. As a result, online advertising revenue is gravely threatened by adblockers, prompting publishers to actively detect adblock users, and subsequently block them or otherwise coerce the user to disable the adblocker — practices we refer to as anti-adblocking. While there has been a degree of sound and fury on the topic, until now we haven’t been able to understand the scale, mechanism and dynamics of anti-adblocking. This is the gap we have started to address, together with researchers from the University of Cambridge, Stony Brook University, University College London, University of California Berkeley, Queen Mary University of London and International Computer Science Institute (Berkeley). We address some of these questions by leveraging a novel approach for identifying third-party services shared across multiple websites to present a first characterization of anti-adblocking across the Alexa Top-5K websites.

We find that at least 6.7% of Alexa Top-5K websites employ anti-adblocking, with the practices finding adoption across a diverse mix of publishers; particularly publishers of “General News”, “Blogs/Wiki”, and “Entertainment” categories. It turns out that these websites owe their anti-adblocking capabilities to 14 unique scripts pulled from 12 unique domains. Unsurprisingly, the most popular domains are those that have skin in the game — Google, Taboola, Outbrain, Ensighten and Pagefair — the latter being a company that specialises in anti-adblocking services. Then there are in-house anti-adblocking solutions that are distributed by a domain to client websites belonging to the same organisation: TripAdvisor distributes an anti-adblocking script to its eight websites with different country code top-level domains, while adult websites (all hosted by MindGeek) turn to DoublePimp. Finally, we visited a sample website for each anti-adblocking script via AdBlock Plus, Ghostery and Privacy Badger, and discovered that half of the 12 anti-adblocking suppliers are counter-blocked by at least one adblocker — suggesting that the arms race has already entered the next level.

It is hard to say how many levels deeper the adblocking arms race might go. While anti-adblocking may provide temporary relief to publishers, it is essentially band-aid solution to mask a deeper issue — the disequilibrium between ads (and, particularly, their behavioural tracking back-end) and information. Any long term solution must address the reasons that brought users to adblockers in the first place. In the meantime, as the arms race continues to escalate, we hope that studies such as ours will bring transparency to this opaque subject, and inform policy that moves us out of the current deadlock.

 

“Ad-Blocking and Counter Blocking: A Slice of the Arms Races” by Rishab Nithyanand, Sheharbano Khattak, Mobin Javed, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, Marjan Falahrastegar, Julia E. Powles, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Hamed Haddadi, and Steven J. Murdoch. arXiv:1605.05077v1 [cs.CR], May 2016.

This post also appears on the UCL Information Security group blog, Bentham’s Gaze.

“Do you see what I see?” ask Tor users, as a large number of websites reject them but accept non-Tor users

Academic papers, Internet censorship, , ,

If you use an anonymity network such as Tor on a regular basis, you are probably familiar with various annoyances in your web browsing experience, ranging from pages saying “Access denied” to having to solve CAPTCHAs before continuing. Interestingly, these hurdles disappear if the same website is accessed without Tor. The growing trend of websites extending this kind of “differential treatment” to anonymous users undermines Tor’s overall utility, and adds a new dimension to the traditional threats to Tor (attacks on user privacy, or governments blocking access to Tor). There is plenty of anecdotal evidence about Tor users experiencing difficulties in browsing the web, for example the user-reported catalog of services blocking Tor. However, we don’t have sufficient detail about the problem to answer deeper questions like: how prevalent is differential treatment of Tor on the web; are there any centralized players with Tor-unfriendly policies that have a magnified effect on the browsing experience of Tor users; can we identify patterns in where these Tor-unfriendly websites are hosted (or located), and so forth.

Today we present our paper on this topic: “Do You See What I See? Differential Treatment of Anonymous Users” at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS). Together with researchers from the University of Cambridge, University College London, University of California, Berkeley and International Computer Science Institute (Berkeley), we conducted comprehensive network measurements to shed light on websites that block Tor. At the network layer, we scanned the entire IPv4 address space on port 80 from Tor exit nodes. At the application layer, we fetched the homepage from the most popular 1,000 websites (according to Alexa) from all Tor exit nodes. We compared these measurements with a baseline from non-Tor control measurements, and uncover significant evidence of Tor blocking. We estimate that at least 1.3 million IP addresses that would otherwise allow a TCP handshake on port 80 block the handshake if it originates from a Tor exit node. We also show that at least 3.67% of the most popular 1,000 websites block Tor users at the application layer.

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Systemization of Pluggable Transports for Censorship Resistance

Academic papers, Internet censorship

An increasing number of countries implement Internet censorship at different levels and for a variety of reasons. Consequently, there is an ongoing arms race where censorship resistance schemes (CRS) seek to enable unfettered user access to Internet resources while censors come up with new ways to restrict access. In particular, the link between the censored client and entry point to the CRS has been a censorship flash point, and consequently the focus of circumvention tools. To foster interoperability and speed up development, Tor introduced Pluggable Transports — a framework to flexibly implement schemes that transform traffic flows between Tor client and the bridge such that a censor fails to block them. Dozens of tools and proposals for pluggable transports  have emerged over the last few years, each addressing specific censorship scenarios. As a result, the area has become too complex to discern a big picture.

Our recent report takes away some of this complexity by presenting a model of censor capabilities and an evaluation stack that presents a layered approach to evaluate pluggable transports. We survey 34 existing pluggable transports and highlight their inflexibility to lend themselves to feature sharability for broader defense coverage. This evaluation has led to a new design for Pluggable Transports – the Tweakable Transport: a tool for efficiently building and evaluating a wide range of Pluggable Transports so as to increase the difficulty and cost of reliably censoring the communication channel.

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