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Analyzing Characteristic Host Access Patterns for Re-Identification of Web User Sessions
Herrmann, Dominik, Gerber, Christoph, Banse, Christian and Federrath, Hannes (2010) Analyzing Characteristic Host Access Patterns for Re-Identification of Web User Sessions. In: 15th Nordic Conference in Secure IT Systems (Nordsec 2010), 27. -30. Oktober 2010, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland.Date of publication of this fulltext: 07 Jun 2011 05:30
Conference or workshop item
DOI to cite this document: 10.5283/epub.21103
Abstract
An attacker, who is able to observe a web user over a long period of time, learns a lot about his interests. It may be difficult to track users with regularly changing IP addresses, though. We show how patterns mined from web traffic can be used to re-identify a majority of users, i. e. link multiple sessions of them. We implement the web user re-identification attack using a Multinomial Naive ...
An attacker, who is able to observe a web user over a long period of time, learns a lot about his interests. It may be difficult to track users with regularly changing IP addresses, though. We show how patterns mined from web traffic can be used to re-identify a majority of users, i. e. link multiple sessions of them. We implement the web user re-identification attack using a Multinomial Naive Bayes classifier and evaluate it using a real-world dataset from 28 users. Our evaluation setup complies with the limited knowledge of an attacker on a malicious web proxy server, who is only able to observe the host names visited by its users. The results suggest that consecutive sessions can be linked with high probability for session durations from 5 minutes to 48 hours and that user profiles degrade only slowly over time. We also propose basic countermeasures and evaluate their efficacy.
Involved Institutions
Details
| Item type | Conference or workshop item (Paper) |
| Date | October 2010 |
| Institutions | Business, Economics and Information Systems > Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik > Alumni or Retired Professors > Lehrstuhl für Wirtschaftsinformatik IV - Management der Informationssicherheit (Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hannes Federrath) |
| Dewey Decimal Classification | 000 Computer science, information & general works > 004 Computer science |
| Status | Published |
| Refereed | Yes, this version has been refereed |
| Created at the University of Regensburg | Yes |
| URN of the UB Regensburg | urn:nbn:de:bvb:355-epub-211035 |
| Item ID | 21103 |
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