Victor Le Pochat (imec-DistriNet, KU Leuven), Tom Van Goethem (imec-DistriNet, KU Leuven), Samaneh Tajalizadehkhoob (Delft University of Technology), Maciej Korczyński (Grenoble Alps University), Wouter Joosen (imec-DistriNet, KU Leuven)

In order to evaluate the prevalence of security and privacy practices on a representative sample of the Web, researchers rely on website popularity rankings such as the Alexa list. While the validity and representativeness of these rankings are rarely questioned, our findings show the contrary: we show for four main rankings how their inherent properties (similarity, stability, representativeness, responsiveness and benignness) affect their composition and therefore potentially skew the conclusions made in studies. Moreover, we find that it is trivial for an adversary to manipulate the composition of these lists. We are the first to empirically validate that the ranks of domains in each of the lists are easily altered, in the case of Alexa through as little as a single HTTP request. This allows adversaries to manipulate rankings on a large scale and insert malicious domains into whitelists or bend the outcome of research studies to their will. To overcome the limitations of such rankings, we propose improvements to reduce the fluctuations in list composition and guarantee better defenses against manipulation. To allow the research community to work with reliable and reproducible rankings, we provide Tranco, an improved ranking that we offer through an online service available at https://tranco-list.eu.

View More Papers

JavaScript Template Attacks: Automatically Inferring Host Information for Targeted...

Michael Schwarz (Graz University of Technology), Florian Lackner (Graz University of Technology), Daniel Gruss (Graz University of Technology)

Read More

Send Hardest Problems My Way: Probabilistic Path Prioritization for...

Lei Zhao (Wuhan University), Yue Duan (University of California, Riverside), Heng Yin (University of California, Riverside), Jifeng Xuan (Wuhan University)

Read More

SABRE: Protecting Bitcoin against Routing Attacks

Maria Apostolaki (ETH Zurich), Gian Marti (ETH Zurich), Jan Müller (ETH Zurich), Laurent Vanbever (ETH Zurich)

Read More

NAUTILUS: Fishing for Deep Bugs with Grammars

Cornelius Aschermann (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Tommaso Frassetto (Technische Universität Darmstadt), Thorsten Holz (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Patrick Jauernig (Technische Universität Darmstadt), Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi (Technische Universität Darmstadt), Daniel Teuchert (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)

Read More