Team for Research in
Ubiquitous Secure Technology

Citation
Umesh Shankar, Chris Karlof. "Doppelganger: Better Browser Privacy Without the Bother". Proceedings of the Thirteenth ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2006), 154-167, November, 2006.

Abstract
We introduce Doppelganger, a novel system for creating and enforcing fine-grained, privacy preserving browser cookie policies with low manual effort. Browser cookies pose privacy risks, since they can be used to track users’ actions in detail, but some cookies also enable useful functionality, like personalization features. Web browsers currently lack an effective cookie management mechanism. Users must choose between two unpalatable options: a permissive, privacy-compromising policy for every site they visit, or a seemingly endless series of questions to which they must supply underinformed opinions. Doppelganger takes a big step forward: it makes automated determinations of cookies’ value to enable a costbenefit analysis, and offers an automated recovery system when that mechanism—or the user—makes an incorrect judgment. Doppelganger leverages client-side parallelism to automatically and simultaneously explore multiple cookie policies, enabling each user to create her ideal cookie policy. We tackle important and difficult subproblems along the way: mechanisms for recording and replaying web sessions; improved handling of third-party cookies; and enforcing fine-grained, per-site cookie mediation. We implemented Doppelganger as a Firefox extension; we discuss experimental results comparing it to various browser settings, as well as lessons learned from the real-world engineering challenges we faced in our implementation.

Electronic downloads

• http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~ckarlof/papers/doppelganger-ccs06.pdf

• HTML

  Umesh Shankar, Chris Karlof. <a
  href="http://www.truststc.org/pubs/189.html"
  >Doppelganger: Better Browser Privacy Without the
  Bother</a>, Proceedings of the Thirteenth ACM
  Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS
  2006), 154-167, November, 2006.

• Plain text

  Umesh Shankar, Chris Karlof. "Doppelganger: Better
  Browser Privacy Without the Bother". Proceedings of the
  Thirteenth ACM Conference on Computer and Communications
  Security (CCS 2006), 154-167, November, 2006.

• BibTeX

  @inproceedings{ShankarKarlof06_DoppelgangerBetterBrowserPrivacyWithoutBother,
      author = {Umesh Shankar and Chris Karlof},
      title = {Doppelganger: Better Browser Privacy Without the
                Bother},
      booktitle = {Proceedings of the Thirteenth ACM Conference on
                Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2006)},
      pages = {154-167},
      month = {November},
      year = {2006},
      abstract = {We introduce Doppelganger, a novel system for
                creating and enforcing fine-grained, privacy
                preserving browser cookie policies with low manual
                effort. Browser cookies pose privacy risks, since
                they can be used to track users’ actions in
                detail, but some cookies also enable useful
                functionality, like personalization features. Web
                browsers currently lack an effective cookie
                management mechanism. Users must choose between
                two unpalatable options: a permissive,
                privacy-compromising policy for every site they
                visit, or a seemingly endless series of questions
                to which they must supply underinformed opinions.
                Doppelganger takes a big step forward: it makes
                automated determinations of cookies’ value to
                enable a costbenefit analysis, and offers an
                automated recovery system when that mechanism—or
                the user—makes an incorrect judgment.
                Doppelganger leverages client-side parallelism to
                automatically and simultaneously explore multiple
                cookie policies, enabling each user to create her
                ideal cookie policy. We tackle important and
                difficult subproblems along the way: mechanisms
                for recording and replaying web sessions; improved
                handling of third-party cookies; and enforcing
                fine-grained, per-site cookie mediation. We
                implemented Doppelganger as a Firefox extension;
                we discuss experimental results comparing it to
                various browser settings, as well as lessons
                learned from the real-world engineering challenges
                we faced in our implementation.},
      URL = {http://www.truststc.org/pubs/189.html}
  }
  

Posted by Chris Karlof on 5 Mar 2007.
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