FoxBeacon

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FoxBeacon

• Web Bug Detector Implementing
• P3P Compact Policy for Mozilla Firefox

Chaiyong Ragkhitwetsagul cragkhit_at_cs.cmu.edu
08-733 Privacy, Law, Policy and Technology
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What is web bugs?

• Web bug is any HTML element (especially image)
  which is created for
• Implicitly embedded in the web page.
• Trying to collect data from users.
• Some characteristics of web bugs
• Tiny (images size is
• Try to place cookie on the local machine
• Come from different domain (third-party)
• Web bugs URLs is lengthy have 1 protocol
• Appear only once
• Alsaid A Martin D, 2002

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Why do we care about it?
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Whats FoxBeacon?

• FoxBeacon is an extension (add-on) for Mozilla
  Firefox.
• Detect web bugs inside a web page
• Notify the user.
• Uses rule sets to judge a web bug.
• Including P3P compact policy. (under dev)

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Why FoxBeacon?

• Mozilla Firefox is a famous web browser (15
  market share)
• Open-source
• Lots of supporting materials on websites
  (documents, forums, etc.)

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Related Works
Web bug detector add-on for Internet Explorer
6 www.bugnosis.org
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Technology Used
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How FoxBeacon works?
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How is it look like?
Alert box show found web bugs
FB icon blinking on the status bar
Get FoxBeacon (beta 1) from www.cs.cmu.edu/cragkh
it/foxbeacon