ShadowBlock: A Lightweight and Stealthy Adblocking Browser

Zhu, Shitong; Iqbal, Umar; Wang, Zhongjie; Qian, Zhiyun; Shafiq, Zubair; Chen, Weiteng

doi:10.1145/3308558.3313558

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 11 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Online advertising (essentially display ads on websites) has been rapidly growing in the last decade, generating a multi-billion dollar market [21,23]. In the past few years, the focus of academic research has been primarily centered on detecting malicious ad contents (malware and aggressive tracking) [16,17,22,27,30,31] and blocking them [29,39,40]. While user privacy and security are of paramount importance, even ads that are safe and not tracking users can have significant performance impact which in turn causes cascading effects on user satisfaction and Internet costs.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

adPerf: Characterizing the Performance of Third-party Ads

Pourghassemi

Bonecutter

Zhou

et al. 2021

Abstract Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGMETRICS / International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Online advertising (essentially display ads on websites) has proliferated in the last decade to the extent where it is now an integral part of the web. In this paper, we apply an in-depth and first-of-akind performance evaluation of web ads. Unlike prior efforts that rely primarily on adblockers, we perform a fine-grained analysis of the web browser's page loading process to demystify the performance cost of web ads. We aim to characterize the cost by every component of an ad, so the publisher, ad syndicate, and advertiser can improve the ad's performance with detailed guidance. For this purpose, we develop a tool, adPerf, for the Chrome browser that classifies page loading workloads into ad-related and main-content at the granularity of browser activities. Our evaluations show that online advertising entails more than 15% of browser page loading workload and approximately 88% of that is spent on JavaScript. On smartphones, this additional cost of ads is 7% lower as we observe mobile pages include fewer and well-optimized ads. We also track the sources and delivery chain of web ads and analyze performance considering the origin of the ad contents. We observe that 2 of the well-known third-party ad domains contribute to 35% of the ads performance cost and surprisingly, top news websites implicitly include unknown third-party ads which in some cases build up to more than 37% of the ads performance cost.

show abstract

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

adPerf: Characterizing the Performance of Third-party Ads

Pourghassemi

Bonecutter

Zhou

et al. 2021

Abstract Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGMETRICS / International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Secondly, as the results suggest, the amount of filter bypassers (8%) will increase as adblock users gain more usage experience. Moreover, the rapid race to develop more effective anti-adblock filter killers (Zhu et al, 2019) could encourage more and more adblock users to become filter bypassers. So, advertising stakeholders face a growing group that will not generate monetizable views of conventional online ads but will continue to view other advertising and non-promotional content shown in the website.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Adblockers are rapidly becoming popular as freely available and easy-to-use software tools that allow Internet users (henceforth "netizens") to avoid unwanted ad impressions during their browsing sessions, with a degree of effectiveness that no mechanical means has previously allowed in the realm of offline media (e.g., remote controls and video recorders with respect to television commercials) (Redondo & Aznar, 2018). The growing popularity of adblockers is also motivated by their abilities (a) to filter the advertising formats that most bother/interrupt netizen browsing experiences, (b) to reduce the number of third-party tracking cookies that threaten netizen privacy, and (c) to increase website loading speed and reduce waste of resources such as bandwidth and computing capacity (Zhu et al, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Responses to Anti-Adblock Filters: Theoretical Foundations, Influential Factors, and Managerial Implications

Redondo

Aznar

2020

Journal of Business Economics and Management

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Ad-supported websites face an increasing loss of monetizable ad impressions due to the rapid spread of adblockers, which allow users to get desired website content without unwanted advertising. As a countermeasure, many of these websites use anti-adblock filters, which detect adblock users and prevent their access to website content unless their adblockers are disabled. Users may certainly respond by disabling their adblockers but also by leaving the website or trying to bypass the anti-adblock filter. To better understand the choice among these responses, we propose a conceptual framework that combines psychological reactance theory along with uses and gratifications theory. We also hypothesize the influence of four user-related factors: (a) more positive (negative) attitudes toward online advertising encourage adblocker deactivation (website abandonment); (b) longer adblock usage experiences enable filter bypassing; (c) wider (narrower) scopes of online activities stimulate filter bypassing (website abandonment); and (d) greater online privacy concerns discourage adblocker deactivation. These hypotheses were supported by a survey conducted by the Spanish advertising industry, but the influence of breadth of online activities was negligible in practice. Our findings suggest the importance of improving attitudes toward online advertising, reducing online privacy concerns, and searching for alternative ways to monetize website visits.

show abstract

“…They also proposed several new ad blocking techniques, including ones that borrow ideas from rootkits to prevent detection by anti-ad blocking scripts. Zhu et al, in [42], proposed ShadowBlock: a new Chromium-based ad-blocking browser that can hide traces of ad-blocking activities from anti-ad blockers. ShadowBlock leverages existing filter lists and hides all ad elements stealthily so anti-ad blocking scripts cannot detect any tampering of the ads (e.g.…”

Section: Resource Blockingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Filter List Generation for Underserved Regions

Sjösten

Snyder

Pastor

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the Web Conference 2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Filter lists play a large and growing role in protecting and assisting web users. The vast majority of popular filter lists are crowd-sourced, where a large number of people manually label resources related to undesirable web resources (e.g. ads, trackers, paywall libraries), so that they can be blocked by browsers and extensions.Because only a small percentage of web users participate in the generation of filter lists, a crowd-sourcing strategy works well for blocking either uncommon resources that appear on "popular" websites, or resources that appear on a large number of "unpopular" websites. A crowd-sourcing strategy will perform poorly for parts of the web with small "crowds", such as regions of the web serving languages with (relatively) few speakers.This work addresses this problem through the combination of two novel techniques: (i) deep browser instrumentation that allows for the accurate generation of request chains, in a way that is robust in situations that confuse existing measurement techniques, and (ii) an ad classifier that uniquely combines perceptual and page-context features to remain accurate across multiple languages.We apply our unique two-step filter list generation pipeline to three regions of the web that currently have poorly maintained filter lists: Sri Lanka, Hungary, and Albania. We generate new filter lists that complement existing filter lists. Our complementary lists block an additional 3,349 of ad and ad-related resources (1,771 unique) when applied to 6,475 pages targeting these three regions.We hope that this work can be part of an increased effort at ensuring that the security, privacy, and performance benefits of web resource blocking can be shared with all users, and not only those in dominant linguistic or economic regions. CCS CONCEPTS• Security and privacy → Human and societal aspects of security and privacy; • Information systems → Web applications.

show abstract

ShadowBlock: A Lightweight and Stealthy Adblocking Browser

Cited by 8 publications

References 11 publications

adPerf: Characterizing the Performance of Third-party Ads

adPerf: Characterizing the Performance of Third-party Ads

Responses to Anti-Adblock Filters: Theoretical Foundations, Influential Factors, and Managerial Implications

Filter List Generation for Underserved Regions

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About