SINBAD: Saliency-informed detection of breakage caused by ad blocking

Saiid El Hajj Chehade, Sandra Siby, Carmela Troncoso

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Privacy-enhancing blocking tools based on filter-list rules tend to break legitimate functionality. Filter-list maintainers could benefit from automated breakage detection tools that allow them to proactively fix problematic rules before deploying them to millions of users. We introduce SINBAD, an automated breakage detector that improves the accuracy over the state of the art by 20%, and is the first to detect dynamic breakage and breakage caused by style-oriented filter rules. The success of SINBAD is rooted in three innovations: (1) the use of user-reported breakage issues in forums that enable the creation of a high-quality dataset for training in which only breakage that users perceive as an issue is included; (2) the use of 'web saliency' to automatically identify user-relevant regions of a website on which to prioritize automated interactions aimed at triggering breakage; and (3) the analysis of webpages via subtrees which enables fine-grained identification of problematic filter rules.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 45th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, SP 2024
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages258-276
Number of pages19
ISBN (Electronic)9798350331301
DOIs
StatePublished - 2024
Event45th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, SP 2024 - San Francisco, United States
Duration: May 20 2024May 23 2024

Publication series

NameProceedings - IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
ISSN (Print)1081-6011

Conference

Conference45th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, SP 2024
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Francisco
Period5/20/245/23/24

Keywords

  • ad blocking
  • machine learning
  • privacy
  • web
  • web breakage

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality
  • Software
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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