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.

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rORAM: Efficient Range ORAM with O(log2 N) Locality

Anrin Chakraborti (Stony Brook University), Adam J. Aviv (United States Naval Academy), Seung Geol Choi (United States Naval Academy), Travis Mayberry (United States Naval Academy), Daniel S. Roche (United States Naval Academy), Radu Sion (Stony Brook University)

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Master of Web Puppets: Abusing Web Browsers for Persistent...

Panagiotis Papadopoulos (FORTH-ICS, Greece), Panagiotis Ilia (FORTH-ICS), Michalis Polychronakis (Stony Brook University, USA), Evangelos P. Markatos (FORTH-ICS, Greece), Sotiris Ioannidis (FORTH-ICS, Greece), Giorgos Vasiliadis (FORTH-ICS, Greece)

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Latex Gloves: Protecting Browser Extensions from Probing and Revelation...

Alexander Sjösten (Chalmers University of Technology), Steven Van Acker (Chalmers University of Technology), Pablo Picazo-Sanchez (Chalmers University of Technology), Andrei Sabelfeld (Chalmers University of Technology)

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Geo-locating Drivers: A Study of Sensitive Data Leakage in...

Qingchuan Zhao (The Ohio State University), Chaoshun Zuo (The Ohio State University), Giancarlo Pellegrino (CISPA, Saarland University; Stanford University), Zhiqiang Lin (The Ohio State University)

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