Detecting Web Tracking at the Network Layer

Third-party tracking allows companies to identify users and track their online activity across different websites or digital services. This paper presents a first experimental study to detect advertisements and tracker by inspecting fully encrypted network transactions at the TCP/IP network level associated with a website. The first results are encouraging and motivate to extend this first proof-of-concept study even further in the future. A classical application area in the future would be the use in areas where communication can only be accessed on encrypted TCP/IP level (keyword secure IoT environments) or the presented approach is used simply to enable a classical extension of the portfolio for tracker detection.