Jiang Zhang (University of Southern California), Konstantinos Psounis (University of Southern California), Muhammad Haroon (University of California, Davis), Zubair Shafiq (University of California, Davis)

Online behavioral advertising, and the associated tracking paraphernalia, poses a real privacy threat. Unfortunately, existing privacy-enhancing tools are not always effective against online advertising and tracking. We propose HARPO, a principled learning-based approach to subvert online behavioral advertising through obfuscation. HARPO uses reinforcement learning to adaptively interleave real page visits with fake pages to distort a tracker’s view of a user’s browsing profile. We evaluate HARPO against real-world user profiling and ad targeting models used for online behavioral advertising. The results show that HARPO improves privacy by triggering more than 40% incorrect interest segments and 6×higher bid values. HARPO outperforms existing obfuscation tools by as much as 16×for the same overhead. HARPO is also able to achieve better stealthiness to adversarial detection than existing obfuscation tools. HARPO meaningfully advances the state-of-the-art in leveraging obfuscation to subvert online behavioral advertising.

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Xueluan Gong (Wuhan University), Yanjiao Chen (Zhejiang University), Jianshuo Dong (Wuhan University), Qian Wang (Wuhan University)

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Testability Tarpits: the Impact of Code Patterns on the...

Feras Al Kassar (SAP Security Research), Giulia Clerici (SAP Security Research), Luca Compagna (SAP Security Research), Davide Balzarotti (EURECOM), Fabian Yamaguchi (ShiftLeft Inc)

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Fuzzing Configurations of Program Options

Zenong Zhang (University of Texas at Dallas), George Klees (University of Maryland), Eric Wang (Poolesville High School), Michael Hicks (University of Maryland), Shiyi Wei (University of Texas at Dallas)

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Gokul CJ (TCS Research, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., Pune), Vijayanand Banahatti (TCS Research, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., Pune), Sachin Lodha (TCS Research, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., Pune)

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