Tongwei Ren (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Alexander Wittmany (University of Kansas), Lorenzo De Carli (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Drew Davidsony (University of Kansas)

DNS CNAME redirections, which can “steer” browser requests towards a domain different than the one in the request’s URI, are a simple and oftentimes effective means to obscure the source of a web object behind an alias. These redirections can be used to make third-party content appear as first-party content. The practice of evading browser security mechanisms through misuse of CNAMEs, referred to as CNAME cloaking, has been recently growing in popularity among advertisers/trackers to bypass blocklists and privacy policies.

While CNAME cloaking has been reported in past measurement studies, its impact on browser cookie policies has not been analyzed. We close this gap by presenting an in-depth characterization of how CNAME redirections affect cookie propagation. Our analysis uses two distinct data collection samples (June and December 2020). Beyond confirming that CNAME cloaking continues to be popular, our analysis identifies a number of websites transmitting sensitive cookies to cloaked third-parties, thus breaking browser cookie policies. Manual review of such cases identifies exfiltration of authentication cookies to advertising/tracking domains, which raises serious security concerns.

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Kai Jansen (Ruhr University Bochum), Liang Niu (New York University), Nian Xue (New York University), Ivan Martinovic (University of Oxford), Christina Pöpper (New York University Abu Dhabi)

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Shadow Attacks: Hiding and Replacing Content in Signed PDFs

Christian Mainka (Ruhr University Bochum), Vladislav Mladenov (Ruhr University Bochum), Simon Rohlmann (Ruhr University Bochum)

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Data Poisoning Attacks to Deep Learning Based Recommender Systems

Hai Huang (Tsinghua University), Jiaming Mu (Tsinghua University), Neil Zhenqiang Gong (Duke University), Qi Li (Tsinghua University), Bin Liu (West Virginia University), Mingwei Xu (Tsinghua University)

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Empirical Scanning Analysis of Censys and Shodan

Christopher Bennett, AbdelRahman Abdou, and Paul C. van Oorschot (School of Computer Science, Carleton University, Canada)

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