Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Research Visitors

Visits of International Scientists

In February-March, the team hosted for two weeks Professor Mariangiola Dezani-Ciancaglini from the University of Torino and Professor Paola Giannini from the University of Piemonte Orientale (Italy). The visit was partly funded by the COST Action on Reversibility.

Marc Feeley, professor at the University of Montréal has been visiting the team from April 1st to June 30th. The visit has been funded by the Labex UCN. M. Feeley has been working with M. Serrano on the compilation of functional languages in general, and JavaScript more specifically.

Internships

Web Tracking through invisible Web beacons

Imane Fouad made an internship from March 2017 until August 2017, followed by a second internship from October 2017 until December 2017. She is selected for a PhD in INDES, and will start on 1 January 2017.

Imane's internship aimed at analyzing the new Web tracking technologies based on “Web beacon”, or “pixel image” tracking. This tracking technology uses an invisible 1x1 pixel image that is used to send information to third-party trackers, while being invisible to the user. Web beacon tracking is particularly invasive because it cannot be blocked by Private browsing mode, AdBlock or Ghostery extensions, and not even by disabling JavaScript.

Imane Fouad has run automated Web experiments using the OpenWPM platform and performed large-scale measurement of the Web beacon tracking on the Web. She detected which companies use Web beacon, how this technology works, and is currently analysing cookie-based tracking techniques such as redirection chains and cookie synching with the ultimate goal to provide a fine-grained classification of existing Web tracking technologies.