Episode 06: Automated Filter Rule Generation for Adblocking

This week, we have Muhammad Haroon as the host and Hieu Le from the University of California, Irvine, as a guest.

In today’s episode, we’re talking about a particular tool that our audience is well familiar with - ad blockers. Ad blockers are used ubiquitously by privacy-conscious folks and normal users who are annoyed by all the ads they see online. However, few are familiar with the effort that goes into building and maintaining an effective ad blocker as the landscape of the web continues to change every day. We’re joined by Hieu today, a PhD candidate from UC Irvine, who will give us a behind-the-scenes look at the world of ad blocking and talk about his own contributions to making ad blocking more robust and effective.

For more information, check out his paper, "AutoFR: Automated Filter Rule Generation for Adblocking", which was recently published at USENIX Security 2023. In addition, check out the open-source tool AutoFR as well as the soon-to-launched autofr.org.