18,571 research outputs found
Forensics Analysis of Privacy of Portable Web Browsers
Web browser vendors offer a portable web browser option which is considered as one of the features that provides user privacy. Portable web browser is a browser that can be launched from a USB flash drive without the need for its installation on the host machine. Most popular web browsers have portable versions of their browsers as well. Portable web browsing poses a great challenge to computer forensic investigators who try to reconstruct the past browsing history, in case of any computer incidence. This research examines various sources in the host machine such as physical memory, temporary, recent, event files, Windows Registry, and Cache.dll files for the evidential information regarding portable browsing session. The portable browsers under this study include Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera. Results of this experiment show that portable web browsers do not provide user-privacy as they are expected to do.
Keywords: computer forensics tools, RAM forensics, volatile memory, forensics artifacts, Registr
Revisiting revisitation in computer interaction: organic bookmark management.
According to Milic-Frayling et al. (2004), there are two general ways of user browsing i.e. search (finding a website where the user has never visited before) and revisitation (returning to a website where the user has visited in the past). The issue of search is relevant to search engine technology, whilst revisitation concerns web usage and browser history mechanisms. The support for revisitation is normally through a set of functional built-in icons e.g. History, Back, Forward and Bookmarks. Nevertheless, for returning web users, they normally find it is easier and faster to re-launch an online search again, rather than spending time to find a particular web site from their personal bookmark and history records. Tauscher and Greenberg (1997) showed that revisiting web pages forms up to 58% of the recurrence rate of web browsing. Cockburn and McKenzie (2001) also stated that 81% of web pages have been previously visited by the user. According to Obendorf et al. (2007), revisitation can be divided into four classifications based on time: short-term (72.6% revisits within an hour), medium-term (12% revisits within a day and 7.8% revisits within a week), and long-term (7.6% revisits longer than a week)
An Australian Perspective on the Challenges for Computer and Network Security for Novice End-Users
A good portion of today\u27s investigations include, at least in part, an examination of the user\u27s web history. Although it has lost ground over the past several years, Microsoft\u27s Internet Explorer still accounts for a large portion of the web browser market share. Most users are now aware that Internet Explorer will save browsing history, user names, passwords and form history. Consequently some users seek to eliminate these artifacts, leaving behind less evidence for examiners to discover during investigations. However, most users, and probably a good portion of examiners are unaware Automatic Crash Recovery can leave a gold mine of recent browsing history in spite of the users attempts to delete historical artifacts. As investigators, we must continually be looking for new sources of evidence; Automatic Crash Recovery is it
Automatic Crash Recovery: Internet Explorer\u27s black box
A good portion of today\u27s investigations include, at least in part, an examination of the user\u27s web history. Although it has lost ground over the past several years, Microsoft\u27s Internet Explorer still accounts for a large portion of the web browser market share. Most users are now aware that Internet Explorer will save browsing history, user names, passwords and form history. Consequently some users seek to eliminate these artifacts, leaving behind less evidence for examiners to discover during investigations. However, most users, and probably a good portion of examiners are unaware Automatic Crash Recovery can leave a gold mine of recent browsing history in spite of the users attempts to delete historical artifacts. As investigators, we must continually be looking for new sources of evidence; Automatic Crash Recovery is it
The Role of the User\u27s Browsing and Query History for Improving MPC-generated Query Suggestions
In this paper we use the user\u27s recent web browsing history in order to provide better query suggestions in an information retrieval system. We have built a Chrome browser plugin that collects each web page visited by a user and submits it to our query suggestion server for indexing, thus building a personal history profile for each user. We then analyze if future queries submitted by a user to the search engine can be predicted from web pages visited by that user inthe past (i.e. his recent browsing history) or from queries submitted by that user in the past (i.e. his recent query history). The contribution of this paper is a method of using this personal history profile for reordering the query suggestions offered by Google when the user searches information on Google, moving query suggestions more relevant to the user\u27s information need to the front positions in the Google provided query suggestions list. We have collected browsing history log data for over 4 months from several users who installed our Chrome plugin on their local computers and then we performed an offline evaluation test that shows that our personalized query suggestion system improves the MRR (i.e. Mean Reciprocal Rank) score of Google query suggestions by approximately 0.04 (i.e. improves Google\u27s MRR score by 12 percents)
Revisiting revisitation in computer interaction: organic bookmark management.
According to Milic-Frayling et al. (2004), there are two general ways of user browsing i.e. search (finding a website where the user has never visited before) and revisitation (returning to a website where the user has visited in the past). The issue of search is relevant to search engine technology, whilst revisitation concerns web usage and browser history mechanisms. The support for revisitation is normally through a set of functional built-in icons e.g. History, Back, Forward and Bookmarks. Nevertheless, for returning web users, they normally find it is easier and faster to re-launch an online search again, rather than spending time to find a particular web site from their personal bookmark and history records. Tauscher and Greenberg (1997) showed that revisiting web pages forms up to 58% of the recurrence rate of web browsing. Cockburn and McKenzie (2001) also stated that 81% of web pages have been previously visited by the user. According to Obendorf et al. (2007), revisitation can be divided into four classifications based on time: short-term (72.6% revisits within an hour), medium-term (12% revisits within a day and 7.8% revisits within a week), and long-term (7.6% revisits longer than a week)
Evaluating the End-User Experience of Private Browsing Mode
Nowadays, all major web browsers have a private browsing mode. However, the
mode's benefits and limitations are not particularly understood. Through the
use of survey studies, prior work has found that most users are either unaware
of private browsing or do not use it. Further, those who do use private
browsing generally have misconceptions about what protection it provides.
However, prior work has not investigated \emph{why} users misunderstand the
benefits and limitations of private browsing. In this work, we do so by
designing and conducting a three-part study: (1) an analytical approach
combining cognitive walkthrough and heuristic evaluation to inspect the user
interface of private mode in different browsers; (2) a qualitative,
interview-based study to explore users' mental models of private browsing and
its security goals; (3) a participatory design study to investigate why
existing browser disclosures, the in-browser explanations of private browsing
mode, do not communicate the security goals of private browsing to users.
Participants critiqued the browser disclosures of three web browsers: Brave,
Firefox, and Google Chrome, and then designed new ones. We find that the user
interface of private mode in different web browsers violates several
well-established design guidelines and heuristics. Further, most participants
had incorrect mental models of private browsing, influencing their
understanding and usage of private mode. Additionally, we find that existing
browser disclosures are not only vague, but also misleading. None of the three
studied browser disclosures communicates or explains the primary security goal
of private browsing. Drawing from the results of our user study, we extract a
set of design recommendations that we encourage browser designers to validate,
in order to design more effective and informative browser disclosures related
to private mode
Adaptive Hypermedia made simple using HTML/XML Style Sheet Selectors
This paper addresses enhancing HTML and XML with adaptation
functionalities. The approach consists in using the path selectors
of the HTML and XML style sheet languages CSS and XSLT for expressing
content and navigation adaptation. Thus, the necessary extensions of
the selector languages are minimal (a few additional constructs suffice),
the processors of these languages can be kept almost unchanged, and no
new algorithms are needed. In addition, XML is used for expressing the
user model data like browsing history, browsing environment (such as
device, location, time, etc.), and application data (such as user performances
on exercises). The goal of the research presented here is not to
propose novel forms or applications of adaptation, but instead to extend
widespread web standards with adaptation functionalities. Essential features
of the proposed approach are its simplicity and both the upwards
and downwards compatibility of the extension
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