DeepAI AI Chat
Log In Sign Up

Ad-versarial: Defeating Perceptual Ad-Blocking

11/08/2018
by   Florian Tramèr, et al.
12

Perceptual ad-blocking is a novel approach that uses visual cues to detect online advertisements. Compared to classical filter lists, perceptual ad-blocking is believed to be less prone to an arms race with web publishers and ad-networks. In this work we use techniques from adversarial machine learning to demonstrate that this may not be the case. We show that perceptual ad-blocking engenders a new arms race that likely disfavors ad-blockers. Unexpectedly, perceptual ad-blocking can also introduce new vulnerabilities that let an attacker bypass web security boundaries and mount DDoS attacks. We first analyze the design space of perceptual ad-blockers and present a unified architecture that incorporates prior academic and commercial work. We then explore a variety of attacks on the ad-blocker's full visual-detection pipeline, that enable publishers or ad-networks to evade or detect ad-blocking, and at times even abuse its high privilege level to bypass web security boundaries. Our attacks exploit the unreasonably strong threat model that perceptual ad-blockers must survive. Finally, we evaluate a concrete set of attacks on an ad-blocker's internal ad-classifier by instantiating adversarial examples for visual systems in a real web-security context. For six ad-detection techniques, we create perturbed ads, ad-disclosures, and native web content that misleads perceptual ad-blocking with 100 example, we demonstrate how a malicious user can upload adversarial content (e.g., a perturbed image in a Facebook post) that fools the ad-blocker into removing other users' non-ad content.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 4

page 10

page 11

page 17

page 18

05/17/2019

Percival: Making In-Browser Perceptual Ad Blocking Practical With Deep Learning

Online advertising has been a long-standing concern for user privacy and...
01/29/2020

A4 : Evading Learning-based Adblockers

Efforts by online ad publishers to circumvent traditional ad blockers to...
07/23/2021

WebGraph: Capturing Advertising and Tracking Information Flows for Robust Blocking

Millions of web users directly depend on ad and tracker blocking tools t...
04/21/2016

Visual Congruent Ads for Image Search

The quality of user experience online is affected by the relevance and p...
02/15/2020

Measuring Abuse in Web Push Advertising

The rapid growth of online advertising has fueled the growth of ad-block...
02/16/2020

To be Tough or Soft: Measuring the Impact of Counter-Ad-blocking Strategies on User Engagement

The fast growing ad-blocker usage results in large revenue decrease for ...
02/17/2023

Beware of Pickpockets: A Practical Attack against Blocking Cards

Today, we rely on contactless smart cards to perform several critical op...

Code Repositories