
Ad-blocker counter-detection: State of the art and new approaches (2017) [pdf] - zealcharm
https://bitbucket.org/joanbrugueram/content-filter-policy/downloads/initialrelease-thesis.pdf
======
zealcharm
This was my undergraduate thesis. In short, apart from the long sections where
I explain the state of online ad-blocker detection, I built a prototype that
can avoid ad-blocker detectors by temporally unhiding the advertisments when a
script from the website queries the DOM for information about them. Basically,
you can also look at it as having a "user DOM" that has the advertisments
hidden and a "website scripts DOM" that has the advertisments visible. I did
this by doing script rewriting through a MITM proxy and JavaScript function
overwriting (hooray prototypes!).

There are some rough edges to this work: Both in form (English is not my first
language, and I was working full time while developing it so it is nowhere as
polished as it should be) and in content (the 'undetectable' ad-blocker
prototype is very basic, and there are some worrying doubts about real-world
feasibility in regards to performance and privacy). I also haven't been able
to continue developing this project further because of real life constraints.

Additionally, a [very innovative
paper]([http://randomwalker.info/publications/ad-blocking-
framework-...](http://randomwalker.info/publications/ad-blocking-framework-
techniques.pdf)) on this area came out while I was working on it, which
simultaneously made some of my stuff redundant, but also complimented my work
very well.

You can also see my presentation
[here]([https://bitbucket.org/joanbrugueram/content-filter-
policy/do...](https://bitbucket.org/joanbrugueram/content-filter-
policy/downloads/initialrelease-presentation.pdf)) for a quick and very rough
summary.

