Profiling Users by Modeling Web Transactions

Abstract

Users of electronic devices, e.g., laptop, smartphone, etc. have characteristic behaviors while surfing the Web. Profiling this behavior can help identify the person using a given device. In this paper, we introduce a technique to profile users based on their web transactions. We compute several features extracted from a sequence of web transactions and use them with one-class classification techniques to profile a user. We assess the efficacy and speed of our method at differentiating 25 users on a dataset representing 6 months of web traffic monitoring from a small company network.