Exploiting DOM mutation for the detection of ad-injecting browser extension

Abstract

Browser extensions provide additional browserfunctionalities which include blocking advertisements, managing passwords, translating pages, and providing dictionaries. Although the extensions provide functionality to user environment, the extensions have been abused to inject advertisements into web pages without user concern. However, identifying ad-injecting extension is fundamentally difficult since differentiating the content modification is related to ad-injecting extension. Thus, a robust technique that has the ability to identify and highlight the Document Object Model (DOM) element that related to ad-injecting extension in DOM tree is needed. To resolve this dilemma, this study proposed to implement DOM Mutation Observer as the core technique to track the changes in DOM tree. The results show that the selected approach managed to identify which DOM element that can be used as an indicator to track the source of modification on DOM tree that is related to ad injection characteristic.