Recently, reproducibility has become a cornerstone in the security and privacy research community, including artifact evaluations and even a new symposium topic. However, Web measurements lack tools that can be reused across many measurement tasks without modification, be robust to circumvention, and remain accurate across the wide range of behaviors in the Web. As a result, most measurement studies use custom tools and varied archival formats, each of unknown correctness and significant limitations, systematically affecting the research's accuracy and reproducibility. To address these limitations, we present WebREC, a Web measurement tool that is, compared against the current state-of-the-art, accurate (i.e., correctly measures and attributes events not possible with existing tools), general (i.e., reusable without modification for a broad range of measurement tasks), and comprehensive (i.e., handling events from all relevant browser APIs). We also present .web, an archival format for the accurate and reproducible measurement of a wide range of past website behaviors. We empirically evaluate WebREC's accuracy, by replicating well-known Web measurement studies and showing that WebREC's results more accurately match our baseline. We then assess if WebREC and .web succeed as general-purpose tools, which could be used to accomplish many Web measurement tasks without modification. We find that this is so: 70% of papers discussed in a 2024 web crawling SoK paper could be conducted using WebREC as is, and a larger number (48%) of papers that could be conducted against .web archives without requiring any new crawling.
Usenix Security Symposium (USENIX-Security)
2025-08-13
2025-05-24