Self-similarity in World Wide Web traffic: evidence and possible causes
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
Statistical Identification of Encrypted Web Browsing Traffic
SP '02 Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
An Empirical Model of HTTP Network Traffic
INFOCOM '97 Proceedings of the INFOCOM '97. Sixteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. Driving the Information Revolution
Inferring the source of encrypted HTTP connections
Proceedings of the 13th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
iPlane: an information plane for distributed services
OSDI '06 Proceedings of the 7th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation - Volume 7
Legal issues surrounding monitoring during network research
Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement
How much can behavioral targeting help online advertising?
Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World wide web
Fingerprinting websites using traffic analysis
PET'02 Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Privacy enhancing technologies
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Online advertising is a rapidly growing industry currently dominated by the search engine 'giant' Google. In an attempt to tap into this huge market, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) started deploying deep packet inspection techniques to track and collect user browsing behavior. However, such techniques violate wiretap laws that explicitly prevent intercepting the contents of communication without gaining consent from consumers. In this paper, we show that it is possible for ISPs to extract user browsing patterns without inspecting contents of communication. Our contributions are threefold. First, we develop a methodology and implement a system that is capable of extracting web browsing features from stored non-content based records of online communication, which could be legally shared. When such browsing features are correlated with information collected by independently crawling the Web, it becomes possible to recover the actual web pages accessed by clients. Second, we systematically evaluate our system on the Internet and demonstrate that it can successfully recover user browsing patterns with high accuracy. Finally, our findings call for a comprehensive legislative reform that would not only enable fair competition in the online advertising business, but more importantly, protect the consumer rights in a more effective way.