@inproceedings{f7d6fa4f37464e67a85960cef549dbd8,
title = "WebRanz: Web page randomization for better advertisement delivery and web-bot prevention",
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 afiecting 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.",
keywords = "Ad-Blockers, Randomization, Web Bots",
author = "Weihang Wang and Yunhui Zheng and Xinyu Xing and Yonghwi Kwon and Xiangyu Zhang and Patrick Eugster",
note = "Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2016 ACM.; 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, FSE 2016 ; Conference date: 13-11-2016 Through 18-11-2016",
year = "2016",
month = nov,
day = "1",
doi = "10.1145/2950290.2950352",
language = "English (US)",
series = "Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering",
publisher = "Association for Computing Machinery",
pages = "205--216",
editor = "Zhendong Su and Thomas Zimmermann and Jane Cleland-Huang",
booktitle = "FSE 2016 - Proceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering",
}