Kepler -- Raising Browser Security Awareness

Web browser security is lacking and browsers are often unable to detect what is unwanted traffic, like contacting tracking sites. Without our direct knowledge, we are exposed to different kinds of security risks during web browsing. Browsing the web causes our browser to render a web page from HTML, CSS and JavaScript but many things that we cannot see happens during this. The web page may have saved data on our computer, tracked sites we have visited, sent us unwanted advertisements and maybe even executed a malicious script. This triggers the need for users to be able to determine themselves which risk they are willing to take. To improve browsing security, third party developers are developing browser extensions. By giving the users detailed information about web requests, we raise awareness and help users make decisions themselves about which websites are secure. To this end, a prototype for displaying this information was developed. The prototype is a Google Chrome extension which gathers and displays detailed information about web sites' activities in real-time. With the extension we are able to inspect every request made by the browser in detail. We can also filter the data according to country. The data is presented in a human readable form using geolocation. With the help of this prototype, users' awareness of web browsing security is raised in an informative and interesting way.