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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday December 27 2017, @09:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the snake-and-the-mongoose dept.

The PDF contains the full paper (14 pages), but also includes the following abstract:

Abstract—Millions of people use adblockers to remove intrusive and malicious ads as well as protect themselves against tracking and pervasive surveillance. Online publishers consider adblockers a major threat to the ad-powered "free" Web. They have started to retaliate against adblockers by employing anti- adblockers which can detect and stop adblock users. To counter this retaliation, adblockers in turn try to detect and filter anti-adblocking scripts. This back and forth has prompted an escalating arms race between adblockers and anti-adblockers.

We want to develop a comprehensive understanding of anti- adblockers, with the ultimate aim of enabling adblockers to bypass state-of-the-art anti-adblockers. In this paper, we present a differential execution analysis to automatically detect and analyze anti-adblockers. At a high level, we collect execution traces by visiting a website with and without adblockers. Through differ- ential execution analysis, we are able to pinpoint the conditions that lead to the differences caused by anti-adblocking code. Using our system, we detect anti-adblockers on 30.5% of the Alexa top- 10K websites which is 5-52 times more than reported in prior literature. Unlike prior work which is limited to detecting visible reactions (e.g., warning messages) by anti-adblockers, our system can discover attempts to detect adblockers even when there is no visible reaction. From manually checking one third of the detected websites, we find that the websites that have no visible reactions constitute over 90% of the cases, completely dominating the ones that have visible warning messages. Finally, based on our findings, we further develop JavaScript rewriting and API hooking based solutions (the latter implemented as a Chrome extension) to help adblockers bypass state-of-the-art anti-adblockers.

The conclusion is as follows:

We presented a differential execution analysis approach to discover anti-adblockers. Our insight is that websites equipped with anti-adblockers will exhibit different execution traces when they are visited by a browser with and without an adblocker. Based on this, our system enables us to unveil many more (up to 52×) anti-adblocking websites and scripts than reported in prior literature. Moreover, since our approach en- ables us to pinpoint the exact branch statements and conditions involved in adblocker detection, we can steer execution away from the anti-adblocking code through JavaScript rewriting or hide the presence of adblockers through API hooking. Our system can bypass a vast majority of anti-adblockers without causing any site functionality breakage (except one with Javascript rewriting).

We anticipate escalation of the technological battle between adblockers and anti-adblockers — at least in the short term. From the perspective of security and privacy conscious users, it is crucial that adblockers are able to keep up with anti- adblockers. Moreover, the increasing popularity of adblocking has already led to various reform efforts within the online advertising industry to improve ads (e.g., Coalition for Better Ads [5], Acceptable Ads Committee [2]) and even alternate monetization models (e.g., Google Contributor [6], Brave Payments [4]). However, to keep up the pressure on publishers and advertisers in the long term, we believe it is crucial that adblockers keep pace with anti-adblockers in the rapidly escalating technological arms race. Our work represents an important step in this direction.

I found it an interesting read, although I accept that the whole 14 pages might be a little too heavy for some.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 27 2017, @09:57PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 27 2017, @09:57PM (#614886)

    Parent post will make no sense when MDC changes sig.

    Disregard MDC sucks cocks.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday December 27 2017, @10:35PM (4 children)

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Wednesday December 27 2017, @10:35PM (#614894) Journal

    Parent post makes no sense as I have and always will leave signatures disabled. They add nothing but useless noise.

    • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday December 28 2017, @12:45AM (3 children)

      by acid andy (1683) on Thursday December 28 2017, @12:45AM (#614935) Homepage Journal

      Yeah, I can see how the distractions introduced by enabling signatures could compromise your efficacy to make hay whilst the intervening mass is insufficient to inhibit the perceived intensity of incoming solar radiation. ;)

      --
      If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 28 2017, @04:36AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 28 2017, @04:36AM (#614981)

        His excited eyes from within the dark interior glazed
        Watered in appreciation of his thoughtful preparation

        .
        .
        .
        Uh man, it's so heavy

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 28 2017, @04:45AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 28 2017, @04:45AM (#614985)

          What happened in the future? Why is everything "heavy"?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 28 2017, @04:07PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 28 2017, @04:07PM (#615142)

        how does it make no sense?

        Oh i understand--you're ignorant of the message.

        He is saying that if you add his signature to a DNS host file, a DNS server zone, or as a manual entry into your adblocker of choice, you can prevent a lot of problems that result from the profiting of those 1x1 sized pixel trackers that follow you around.

        But you'd already know that if you knew anything about modern privacy and security concerns on the Internet.

        but please AC (but not acid andy), keep shooting the messengers. eventually your kardashan videos will load if you agree to install enough new codecs.

  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday December 27 2017, @10:59PM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Wednesday December 27 2017, @10:59PM (#614907) Homepage Journal

    Since I've been in Portland it's been at Hawk's PDX

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]