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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Azadeh Tabiban (CIISE, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada), Heyang Zhao (CIISE, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada), Yosr Jarraya (Ericsson Security Research, Ericsson Canada, Montreal, QC, Canada), Makan Pourzandi (Ericsson Security Research, Ericsson Canada, Montreal, QC, Canada), Mengyuan Zhang (Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China), Lingyu Wang (CIISE, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada)

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Demystifying Local Business Search Poisoning for Illicit Drug Promotion

Peng Wang (Indiana University Bloomington), Zilong Lin (Indiana University Bloomington), Xiaojing Liao (Indiana University Bloomington), XiaoFeng Wang (Indiana University Bloomington)

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Transparency Dictionaries with Succinct Proofs of Correct Operation

Ioanna Tzialla (New York University), Abhiram Kothapalli (Carnegie Mellon University), Bryan Parno (Carnegie Mellon University), Srinath Setty (Microsoft Research)

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GPSKey: GPS based Secret Key Establishment for Intra-Vehicle Environment

Edwin Yang (University of Oklahoma) and Song Fang (University of Oklahoma)

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