A software infrastructure for authenticated Web metering

Abstract

As the popularity of the Internet and the number of resources available on it have grown, potential customers are increasingly turning to it for information about products and services. Accordingly, online advertising is gaining a significant portion of the advertising market. The Internet has become a mainstream advertising channel, surpassing traditional media such as newspapers and radio in number of advertisements. Advertisers exploit the popularity of the best-known Web sites, typically search engines or portals, to advertise their products and reach the most potential customers. Traditional rating systems are of little value when applied to the Internet because of the enormous number of Web pages available to online advertisements. Counting accesses to a Web service is a difficult task and the data may be unreliable. Several metering techniques attempt to accurately measure the number of visits a site receives and hence the advertising exposure, but advertisers and auditing companies haven't adopted a standard technique. We propose a framework based on hash chains. Unlike similar approaches, our implementation minimizes the overhead associated with the additional communication required to implement the protocol while providing an efficient and flexible scheme. Furthermore, the resulting framework offers additional guarantees such as security and nonrepudiation of the produced proof of visits.