PURL: Safe and Effective Sanitization of Link Decoration

arXiv:2308.03417v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: While privacy-focused browsers have taken steps to block third-party cookies and mitigate browser fingerprinting, novel tracking techniques that can bypass existing countermeasures continue to emerge. Since trackers need to share information from the client-side to the server-side through link decoration regardless of the tracking technique they employ, a promising orthogonal approach is to detect and sanitize tracking information in decorated links. To this end, we present PURL (pronounced purel-l), a machine-learning approach that leverages a …

arxiv block browser browser fingerprinting browsers bypass can client client-side continue cookies countermeasures cs.cr cs.lg fingerprinting information link novel party privacy safe server share share information taken techniques third third-party trackers tracking