TY - GEN
T1 - **TITLE HIDDEN-per chairs request**
AU - Oh, Chang Seok
AU - Kanich, Chris
AU - McCoy, Damon
AU - Pearce, Paul
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors thank Masood Ali and the anonymous reviewers whose thoughtful feedback and engagement during rebuttals improved the work significantly. This work was supported in part by funding from ONR award N00014-18-1-2662 and NSF CNS award 2151837.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Owner/Author.
PY - 2022/11/7
Y1 - 2022/11/7
N2 - Targeted advertising is a pervasive practice in the advertising ecosystem, with complex representations of user identity central to targeting. Ad networks are incentivized to tie ephemeral cookies across devices to lasting durable identifiers such as email addresses in order to develop comprehensive cross-device user profiles. Third-party ad networks typically do not have relationships with users and must rely on external parties such as merchant websites for durable identity information, introducing intricate trust relationships. We find attackers can exploit these trust relationships to confuse an ad network into linking an unprivileged attacker's browser to a victim's identity, thus "impersonating"the victim to the ad network. We present Advertising Identity Entanglement, a vulnerability to extract specific user browsing behavior from ad networks remotely, knowing only a victim's email address, with no access to the victim, ad network, or websites. This new fundamental flaw in cross-device tracking allows attackers to pass erroneous identity information to third-party ad networks, causing the networks to confuse attacker and victim. Once entangled, the attacker receives advertisements intended for the victim across the entire ad network. We find identity entanglement is a significant user privacy vulnerability where attackers can learn detailed victim browsing activity such as retail websites, products, and even specific apartments or hotels the victim has interacted with. The vulnerability is also bi-directional, with the attacker able to cause specific ads to be shown to the victim, introducing the possibility of embarrassment attacks and blackmail. We have disclosed the vulnerability; Criteo, one of the largest third-party ad networks, acknowledges the attack.
AB - Targeted advertising is a pervasive practice in the advertising ecosystem, with complex representations of user identity central to targeting. Ad networks are incentivized to tie ephemeral cookies across devices to lasting durable identifiers such as email addresses in order to develop comprehensive cross-device user profiles. Third-party ad networks typically do not have relationships with users and must rely on external parties such as merchant websites for durable identity information, introducing intricate trust relationships. We find attackers can exploit these trust relationships to confuse an ad network into linking an unprivileged attacker's browser to a victim's identity, thus "impersonating"the victim to the ad network. We present Advertising Identity Entanglement, a vulnerability to extract specific user browsing behavior from ad networks remotely, knowing only a victim's email address, with no access to the victim, ad network, or websites. This new fundamental flaw in cross-device tracking allows attackers to pass erroneous identity information to third-party ad networks, causing the networks to confuse attacker and victim. Once entangled, the attacker receives advertisements intended for the victim across the entire ad network. We find identity entanglement is a significant user privacy vulnerability where attackers can learn detailed victim browsing activity such as retail websites, products, and even specific apartments or hotels the victim has interacted with. The vulnerability is also bi-directional, with the attacker able to cause specific ads to be shown to the victim, introducing the possibility of embarrassment attacks and blackmail. We have disclosed the vulnerability; Criteo, one of the largest third-party ad networks, acknowledges the attack.
KW - ad networks
KW - targeted advertising
KW - tracking
KW - web privacy
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85143046760&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1145/3548606.3560641
DO - 10.1145/3548606.3560641
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85143046760
T3 - Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
SP - 2401
EP - 2414
BT - CCS 2022 - Proceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 28th ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2022
Y2 - 7 November 2022 through 11 November 2022
ER -