Features:
- Host organization: INRIA Sophia Antipolis http://www.inria.fr/en/centre/sophia
- Salary: around 1000 euros/month + flight tickets
- Period: 6 months (tentative date of starting: February 2015)
- Background: Networking, programming 

Topic:
With the recent revelations of Snowden [1], privacy is nowadays a major question for Internet users but they want to have free access to all services. However, to propose free services, service providers heavily rely on advertisement revenues. To maximize such revenues, tracking is necessary so to deliver targeted advertisement. Interestingly, while it is well known that websites spy their users with web trackers (e.g., AdSense), little is known about the recently discovered "Perma-Cookies [2]. Perma-Cookies are identification added by Internet Service Providers (ISP) in their customers traffic to allow advertisers to uniquely identify users. To do so, ISP directly modifies the traffic of their customers and adds meta information in the HTTP traffic. The added meta data is a string that uniquely identifies the ISP customer and that is revealed in the HTTP header so that service providers and advertisers can track the customers even when they are blocking trackers with their Internet browsers.

Such practices if confirmed go against the neutrality of Internet Service Providers and make them active actors in the Internet advertisement chain. Without taking a position regarding these practices, we believe it is important to shed light on it and inform end users about their prevalence.
The proposed work is three-fold.
1. The student will study the prominence of the phenomenon by using the distributed RIPE ATLAS measurement facility [Atlas]. ATLAS consists in a collection of hundreds of programmable probing points deployed on voluntary basis by people all around the Internet. This facility allows one to perform Internet measurements as if she were directly connected in hundreds of different ISPs.
2. The student will develop an extension for web browsers so to allow users to determine whether their ISP is using "Perma-Cookies". This extension will use active measurements to vantage points to detect the presence of "Perma-Cookies" (n.b., how these "Perma-Cookies" are implemented in practice is still largely unknown). If such a "Perma-Cookie" header is found the user will get a notification from the extension. Since browser extensions are not widely supported by mobile web browsers, the student will also port the extension to a mobile application that notifies users about the presence of "Perma-Cookies".
3. The student will design a method to work around "Perma-Cookies" to ensure
the privacy.
Requirements:
- Good academic file
- Motivation letter (in English)
- Level of English and accreditation, if any.

How to apply: Send a mail to vd.estudiantat@fib.upc.edu with subject “Final degree project at INRIA” with your personal data, the motivation letter (in a file attached) and the accreditation of your level of English. A good academic file is highly recommended.

Deadline: December 14th 2014