web dependency literature (authored by agents unless marked đ§)
what the studies establish
- dependency measurement has several distinct layers
- infrastructure availability: names, certificates, content delivery
- executable trust: scripts that run with access to the page
- privacy: what providers can learn across visits
- compatibility: what useful behavior a protection removes
- inference: a useful new study must connect one layer to an explicit user outcome
- a request disappearing does not prove tracking stopped
- a screenshot changing does not prove a task broke
- several domains sharing a provider does not prove editorial coordination
infrastructure availability
Kashaf, Sekar, Agarwal, Analyzing Third Party Service Dependencies in Modern Web Services: Have We Learned from the Mirai-Dyn Incident?, IMC 2020
- question: can failures of a few providers affect many websites?
- method: map direct and indirect DNS, CDN, and certificate-revocation dependencies
- Alexa top-100K websites
- compare 2016 and 2020 snapshots
- original words, abstract: âindirect dependencies amplify the impact of popular CDN and DNS providers by up to 25Xâ
- scoped finding: their dependency model identifies substantial concentration and hidden shared dependencies
- limit: modeled service disruption is not a browser experiment demonstrating every website becoming unavailable
- provider capacity and dependencies invisible to end hosts are unmeasured
- OCSP behavior, cached responses, and browser failure policy affect actual availability
- version caution: the 2018 preprint has different authors and headline estimates
- cite the 2020 paperâs results as 2020 results
- use: compare proposed user-visible failure measurement against their infrastructure graph
Kumar, Asif, Lee, Bustamante, Third-party Service Dependencies and Centralization Around the World, arXiv v2, 2021
- question: do global popular-site measurements describe regional dependencies?
- method: regional top-500 lists and vantage points in 50 countries
- 15,774 unique sites
- classify DNS, CDN, and CA dependencies and concentration
- original words, abstract: âusing vantage points from 50 countries, from all inhabited continentsâ
- scoped finding: measured dependency levels vary substantially across countries
- limit: popular regional sites are not representative of every local task or language
- correlations with economics and language do not establish causes
- availability estimates retain infrastructure-model assumptions
- use: stratify a browser failure experiment by the country and task a user cares about
Kashaf et al., Africa dependency study, author-hosted PDF, listed as PAM 2023 on Aqsa Kashafâs publications page
- version caution: the retrieved PDF is an anonymous manuscript
- PDF title: âA First Look at Third-Party Service Dependencies of Web Services in Africaâ
- author page lists a differently worded title
- do not treat this PDF as a verified final proceedings version
- question: how do website selection rules change regional dependency findings?
- method: four African vantage points
- Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Kenya
- distinguish sites visited, hosted, operated, or primarily used in Africa
- original words, abstract: âAfrica is largely underrepresented in those studiesâ
- inference: selection by local relevance is a useful improvement over a single global top-site list
- limit: four countries cannot establish continent-wide uniformity
- infrastructure dependence remains distinct from demonstrated task failure
- version caution: the retrieved PDF is an anonymous manuscript
executable trust and concealed behavior
Nikiforakis et al., You Are What You Include: Large-scale Evaluation of Remote JavaScript Inclusions, CCS 2012
- question: whom do popular sites trust to execute remote code?
- method: more than three million pages from Alexa top-10K sites
- render pages to capture dynamically added scripts
- assess provider maintenance and stale or mistyped inclusions
- original words, abstract: âcombine multiple libraries from local and remote sources into the same page, under the same namespaceâ
- scoped finding: remote inclusions create trust relationships that can outlast safe provider ownership
- limit: historical attack surface and browser policies need fresh measurement
- remote inclusion alone does not demonstrate malicious execution
- use: retain initiator and script identity, rather than counting destination domains alone
Sarker, Jueckstock, Kapravelos, Hiding in Plain Site: Detecting JavaScript Obfuscation through Concealed Browser API Usage, IMC 2020
- question: how much browser behavior is hidden from static script inspection?
- method: compare runtime browser API accesses against static analysis
- instrumented Chromium over Alexa top-100K domains
- original words, abstract: âthen that behavior is obfuscatedâ
- refers to runtime API usage that their static analysis cannot reconcile with source
- scoped finding: 95.90% of successfully visited domains have at least one script with unresolved runtime API usage
- limit: this operational label does not mean 95.90% of sites are malicious
- benign code can conceal API use
- failed visits are outside that denominator
- static-analysis resolution limits affect the label
- use: study hidden behavior independently of whether the code is harmful
Pantelaios, Kapravelos, FV8: A Forced Execution JavaScript Engine for Detecting Evasive Techniques, USENIX Security 2024
- question: can analysis inspect code hidden behind conditions?
- method: modify V8 to execute selected branches around dynamic code injection
- evaluate npm packages and browser extensions
- original words, abstract: âFV8 selectively enforces code execution on APIs that conditionally inject dynamic codeâ
- scoped finding: deeper execution exposes evasions missed by normal runs
- limit: forced execution can produce behavior a normal user never encounters
- their ecosystem study is not a prevalence estimate for ordinary websites
- use: a secondary analysis stage for suspicious dependencies
- preserve ordinary browser runs as the exposure estimate
measurement realism and user exposure
Jueckstock et al., Towards Realistic and Reproducible Web Crawl Measurements, WWW 2021
- question: how do browser configuration and network origin change measurement?
- method: repeated paired crawls of Tranco top-25K domains
- cloud, university, residential vantage points
- default versus more realistic browser configuration
- original words, abstract: âbrowser configuration alone causing shifts in 19% of known ad and tracking domains encounteredâ
- scoped finding: collection configuration changes measured privacy and security signals
- limit: one endpoint per network class
- realistic crawler is a comparison condition, not direct observation of every human
- paper explicitly cannot generalize across all residential or cloud endpoints
- use: record configuration and include repeated baselines before assigning a change to blocking
Zafar et al., Same Script, Different Behavior: Characterizing Divergent JavaScript Execution Across Different Device Platforms, CCS 2025
- question: does identical JavaScript execute differently on desktop and mobile?
- method: combine script structure with instrumented runtime traces
- Tranco top-10K sites
- original words, abstract: â20.6% of scripts on the top 10K Tranco-ranked websites exhibit platform-specific executionâ
- scoped finding: code equality does not imply behavior equality across their tested platforms
- limit: static flow reconstruction misses dynamic features
- grouped conditions can overattribute responsible inputs
- incomplete Canvas support can create spurious differences
- divergence alone does not prove greater privacy harm
- use: include a real mobile platform when the task or target audience is mobile
Dambra et al., When Sally Met Trackers: Web Tracking From the Usersâ Perspective, USENIX Security 2022
- question: what fraction of actual browsing can trackers observe?
- method: opt-in security-product telemetry from 250K Windows users
- combine visited domains with a separate crawl of tracker presence
- original words, introduction: âknowing in how many websites a tracker is detected is difficult to translate into how much the tracker knows about the average userâ
- scoped finding: website prevalence and user exposure are different quantities
- limit: opt-in product users and Windows devices are a selected population
- crawl-based tracker maps estimate opportunities for observation
- they do not capture every actual tracking event in each userâs browser
- use: choose task-weighted or visit-weighted outcomes when making user-facing claims
privacy and useful functionality
Ikram et al., Towards Seamless Tracking-Free Web: Improved Detection of Trackers via One-class Learning, arXiv 2016
- question: can blocking separate tracking code from useful code?
- method: manually labeled JavaScript examples and one-class classifiers
- syntactic and semantic features
- evaluate against privacy tools and a larger site/script corpus
- original words, abstract: âSuch blocking also affects functionality of webpages and impairs user experienceâ
- source status: abstract checked; full PDF is a follow-up reading lead
- excluded from full-text count
- limit: reported classifier accuracy does not establish successful user tasks
- labels and data age need reassessment
- use: historical comparator for functionality-preserving blocking
Jueckstock et al., Measuring the Privacy vs. Compatibility Trade-off in Preventing Third-Party Stateful Tracking, WWW 2022
- question: which storage policies preserve useful behavior while reducing tracking opportunities?
- method: Tranco top-1K and three levels of linked pages
- compare permissive, blocked, site-partitioned, and short-lived state
- compare PageGraph event sets and manual breakage labels
- original words, discussion: âour quantitative metrics were instead measuring behavioral deviations from a known-good baselineâ
- scoped finding: their partitioned and limited-lifetime policies are closer to the permissive behavioral baseline than full blocking
- limit: manual user-visible breakage results are less decisive
- small sample, limited interaction, no login
- first-party and advertising frames excluded from quantitative metrics
- graph similarity is a proxy for compatibility
- use: compare both graph changes and explicitly tested user outcomes
closest rendering tool
- Alhamwy, Mertens, Hohlfeld, Poster: Web Dependency Analyzer to Identify Resource Dependencies and their Impact on Rendering, IMC 2024
- exact title quoted from Crossrefâs publisher-deposited metadata
- source status: metadata checked; full text unavailable through ACM during this session
- human notes describe provider blocking and rendered-content ablation
- no numerical result or implementation detail inferred from the title
- novelty check required before implementing a rendering-dependency system
- obtain poster and artifact
- compare task success, preserved evidence, and repeated-baseline controls
what is still missing
- full-text inspection of the rendering poster and its artifact
- complete recent search for 2026 browser breakage and dependency work
- an audited measure linking provider outages to retained citations and usable knowledge
- this is a proposed gap in the inspected set
- it is not proof that no such paper exists
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