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A Passive External Web Surveillance Technique for Private Networks

  • Conference paper
Computer Network Security (MMM-ACNS 2005)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCCN,volume 3685))

Abstract

The variety and richness of what users browse on the Internet has made the communications of web-browsing hosts an attractive target for surveillance. We show that passive external surveillance of web-browsing hosts in private networks is possible despite the anonymizing effects of NATs and HTTP proxies at the gateway. These devices effectively anonymize the origin of communication streams, and remove many identifying features, making it difficult to group web traffic into mutually disjoint same-host single user sets called sessions. Sessions offer a complete picture of each user’s web browsing experience. Without them, passive external surveillance is of little use. This paper offers a content analysis technique called Link Chaining that aids the sessionization process by recovering large pieces of sessions called session fragments. The technique is based on the knowledge that the majority of downloaded web resources are clicked-to from other web pages. By following hyperlinks in the bodies of HTTP messages in passively collected trace data, web traffic can be be coalesced into session fragments and used by human analysts to isolate individual users’ sessions. The technique gives the human analyst a significant advantage over manual methods. The implementation presented here has been tested on accumulated local data and demonstrates the feasibility of the scheme.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Royal Military College of Canada, PO Box 17000, Station Forces Kingston, Ontario, K7K 7B4, Canada

    Constantine Daicos & Scott Knight

Authors
  1. Constantine Daicos
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  2. Scott Knight
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. St. Petersburg Intitute for Informaticsand Automation, 39, 14-th Liniya, 199178, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Vladimir Gorodetsky

  2. Computer Security Research Group, St. Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation, 39, 14 Liniya, 199178, St.-Petersburg, Russia

    Igor Kotenko

  3. US Air Force, Binghamton University (SUNYI), 13902, Binghamton, NY, USA

    Victor Skormin

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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Daicos, C., Knight, S. (2005). A Passive External Web Surveillance Technique for Private Networks. In: Gorodetsky, V., Kotenko, I., Skormin, V. (eds) Computer Network Security. MMM-ACNS 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3685. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11560326_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11560326_7

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-29113-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31998-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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