DT-Track: Using DNS-Timing Side Channel for Mobile User Tracking

Abstract

Targeted advertising is a form of online advertising that is directed towards audiences with certain traits. User tracking is useful to provide tailored web content or online advertisement. However, in the case without user online identities, targeted advertising becomes difficult. The challenge gets even higher in a mobile environment as the mobile user roams from one location to another location. In this paper, we propose a third-party web tracking scheme, named DT-Track, which can stealthily track users via the proposed side channel on DNS. The side channel is built on top of the cache existence of DNS records, which are commonly used.