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Longitudinal study of the use of client-side security mechanisms on the European web

Book Contribution - Book Chapter Conference Contribution

As the web rapidly expands and gets integrated into all kinds of business, browsing the web has become an important part of people's daily lives. With the rising importance of various web applications sit in a browser, attackers also shifted their focus towards client-side attacks. To defend against these attacks, numerous client-side security mechanisms for the browser are proposed. The presence of these mechanisms on a website can be used as an indicator of the security awareness and practices of that website. In this paper, through a large-scale analysis of more than 18,000 European websites over two years, we analyze the longitudinal trends of the adoption of client-side security mechanisms. We validate that the most popular websites were adopting new security features quicker that less popular websites in the two year timeframe. By examining the websites based on their business vertical, we observe that the websites in the Finance and Education category are outperforming other verticals in the data set, with respect to the usage of client-side security mechanisms.
Book: Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web
Pages: 457 - 462
ISBN:978-1-4503-4144-8
Publication year:2016
Accessibility:Open