Hieu Le (University of California, Irvine), Athina Markopoulou (University of California, Irvine), Zubair Shafiq (University of California, Davis)

The adblocking arms race has escalated over the last few years. An entire new ecosystem of circumvention (CV) services has recently emerged that aims to bypass adblockers by obfuscating site content, making it difficult for adblocking filter lists to distinguish between ads and functional content. In this paper, we investigate recent anti-circumvention efforts by the adblocking community that leverage custom filter lists. In particular, we analyze the anti-circumvention filter list (ACVL), which supports advanced filter rules with enriched syntax and capabilities designed specifically to counter circumvention. We show that keeping ACVL rules up-to-date requires expert list curators to continuously monitor sites known to employ CV services and to discover new such sites in the wild — both tasks require considerable manual effort. To help automate and scale ACVL curation, we develop CV-INSPECTOR, a machine learning approach for automatically detecting adblock circumvention using differential execution analysis. We show that CV-INSPECTOR achieves 93% accuracy in detecting sites that successfully circumvent adblockers. We deploy CV-INSPECTOR on top-20K sites to discover the sites that employ circumvention in the wild.We further apply CV-INSPECTOR to a list of sites that are known to utilize circumvention and are closely monitored by ACVL authors. We demonstrate that CV-INSPECTOR reduces the human labeling effort by 98%, which removes a major bottleneck for ACVL authors. Our work is the first large-scale study of the state of the adblock circumvention arms race, and makes an important step towards automating anti-CV efforts.

View More Papers

More than a Fair Share: Network Data Remanence Attacks...

Leila Rashidi (University of Calgary), Daniel Kostecki (Northeastern University), Alexander James (University of Calgary), Anthony Peterson (Northeastern University), Majid Ghaderi (University of Calgary), Samuel Jero (MIT Lincoln Laboratory), Cristina Nita-Rotaru (Northeastern University), Hamed Okhravi (MIT Lincoln Laboratory), Reihaneh Safavi-Naini (University of Calgary)

Read More

Let’s Stride Blindfolded in a Forest: Sublinear Multi-Client Decision...

Jack P. K. Ma (The Chinese University of Hong Kong), Raymond K. H. Tai (The Chinese University of Hong Kong), Yongjun Zhao (Nanyang Technological University), Sherman S.M. Chow (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Read More

Deceptive Deletions for Protecting Withdrawn Posts on Social Media...

Mohsen Minaei (Visa Research), S Chandra Mouli (Purdue University), Mainack Mondal (IIT Kharagpur), Bruno Ribeiro (Purdue University), Aniket Kate (Purdue University)

Read More

Detecting DolphinAttacks Based on Microphone Array

Guoming Zhang, Xiaoyu Ji (Zhejiang University)

Read More