AdGraph: a graph-based approach to ad and tracker blocking
File(s)adgraph-sp2020.pdf (325.97 KB)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
User demand for blocking advertising and tracking online is large and growing. Existing tools, both deployed and described in research, have proven useful, but lack either the completeness or robustness needed for a general solution. Existing detection approaches generally focus on only one aspect of advertising or tracking (e.g. URL patterns, code structure), making existing approaches susceptible to evasion. In this work we present AdGraph, a novel graph-based machine learning approach for detecting advertising and tracking resources on the web. AdGraph differs from existing approaches by building a graph representation of the HTML structure, network requests, and JavaScript behavior of a webpage, and using this unique representation to train a classifier for identifying advertising and tracking resources. Because AdGraph considers many aspects of the context a network request takes place in, it is less susceptible to the single-factor evasion techniques that flummox existing approaches. We evaluate AdGraph on the Alexa top-10K websites, and find that it is highly accurate, able to replicate the labels of human-generated filter lists with 95.33% accuracy, and can even identify many mistakes in filter lists. We implement AdGraph as a modification to Chromium. AdGraph adds only minor overhead to page loading and execution, and is actually faster than stock Chromium on 42% of websites and AdBlock Plus on 78% of websites. Overall, we conclude that AdGraph is both accurate enough and performant enough for online use, breaking comparable or fewer websites than popular filter list based approaches.
Date Issued
2020-05-18
Date Acceptance
2020-02-01
Citation
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2020, pp.65-78
ISBN
978-1-7281-3497-0
ISSN
2375-1207
Publisher
IEEE
Start Page
65
End Page
78
Journal / Book Title
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
Copyright Statement
© 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Identifier
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9152669
Source
41st IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P)
Subjects
cs.CY
cs.CY
cs.LG
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2020-05-18
Finish Date
2020-05-21
Coverage Spatial
San Francisco, CA, USA
Date Publish Online
2020-07-30