Home // SECURWARE 2023, The Seventeenth International Conference on Emerging Security Information, Systems and Technologies // View article
Authors:
Stefan Kiltz
Robert Altschaffel
Jana Dittmann
Keywords: Security, trust and privacy metrics; IT forensics; Attribution
Abstract:
Science tracking in information systems provided by publishers is a common pattern in today's scientific world. Besides impacting on the privacy of researchers, science tracking can have potentially adverse or even grave consequences for researchers. The comparison of tracking mechanisms employed by publishers can lead to interesting findings about their popularity over time and to better fine-tuned countermeasures. Publisher could also be identified according to the tracking mechanisms employed. Studies concerning user tracking in general and in particular science tracking exist. The approaches considered therein are concerned with detecting whether tracking is employed on the example of Web, App and email. Our goals are to allow a better comparison of publisher tracking as a privacy measurement by also including results from different forensic tools and to get hints/leads to individualize (attribute) science trackers. Towards our goals we introduce a BNF-style expression based Science-Tracking Fingerprint (STF) as semantics to support individualizing a publisher and for privacy measurements generally. Syntactically, a vector consisting of element-value pairs is created. We propose a certainty category as a metric in support of privacy measurement to rank privacy measurements as plausible, uncertain, or non-match. We investigate intra- and inter-application matches per publisher on URL and tracker information of existing and adapted static tools (of-/on-premises). We analyze 4 exemplary chosen science publishers in 3 selected application areas (web, app, email) with 4 known tools for web, 3 known tools for apps and 2 known tools for email. For the latter, we also introduce a self-implemented tool. We show that the STF is, according to our first tests, fit for the purpose of comparing of publisher tracking and to provide hints/leads for individualization of publishers employing science tracking.
Pages: 88 to 97
Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2023
Publication date: September 25, 2023
Published in: conference
ISSN: 2162-2116
ISBN: 978-1-68558-092-6
Location: Porto, Portugal
Dates: from September 25, 2023 to September 29, 2023