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FSE 2016

WebRanz: web page randomization for better advertisement delivery and web-bot prevention

Weihang Wang, Yunhui Zheng, Xinyu Xing, Yonghwi Kwon, Xiangyu Zhang, Patrick Th. Eugster

PDFDOI 10.1145/2950290.2950352dblp

Abstract

Nowadays, a rapidly increasing number of web users are using Ad-blockers to block online advertisements. Ad-blockers are browser-based software that can block most Ads on the websites, speeding up web browsers and saving bandwidth. Despite these benefits to end users, Ad-blockers could be catastrophic for the economic structure underlying the web, especially considering the rise of Ad-blocking as well as the number of technologies and services that rely exclusively on Ads to compensate their cost. In this paper, we introduce WebRanz that utilizes a randomization mechanism to circumvent Ad-blocking. Using WebRanz, content publishers can constantly mutate the internal HTML elements and element attributes of their web pages, without affecting their visual appearances and functionalities. Randomization invalidates the pre-defined patterns that Ad-blockers use to filter out Ads. Though the design of WebRanz is motivated by evading Ad-blockers, WebRanz also benefits the defense against bot scripts. We evaluate the effectiveness of WebRanz and its overhead using 221 randomly sampled top Alexa web pages and 8 representative bot scripts.

BibTeX
@inproceedings{Wang-al:FSE16,
  author    = {Weihang Wang and
               Yunhui Zheng and
               Xinyu Xing and
               Yonghwi Kwon and
               Xiangyu Zhang and
               Patrick Th. Eugster},
  title     = {{WebRanz:} web page randomization for better advertisement delivery and web-bot prevention},
  booktitle = {FSE},
  pages     = {205--216},
  publisher = {{ACM}},
  year      = {2016},
}

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