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Project

Developing a fundamental methodology to analyze the runtime behavior of JavaScript

More than three billion Internet users around the world use World Wide Web every day. People trust websites with their personal emails, online banking credentials and their personal interests. Thanks to the inner workings of the web, all online movements leave a digital footprint that can be recorded and aggregated to build a detailed behavioral profile of individual users. Web privacy research studies ways in which websites track users to build their behavioral profiles. Further, malicious web programs distributed by the websites or advertisements, can compromise a computer and lead to theft of banking credentials or installation of malicious ransomware. In this project, we plan to study advanced tracking mechanisms that are hard to detect and resilient to blocking or removing. The main objective of the study is to make the web a more secure and privacy respecting space by providing more transparency for otherwise invisible tracking practices. We plan to achieve this by developing a novel methodology that enables further, more advanced studies of tracking mechanisms on the web. We will also conduct an analysis of tracking technologies that can be used to track individuals across different devices such as their smartphones and laptops.

Date:1 Oct 2017 →  31 Aug 2022
Keywords:runtime behavior, JavaScript
Disciplines:Modelling, Biological system engineering, Signal processing