Next Generation of Impersonator Bots: Mimicking Human Browsing on Previously Unvisited Sites
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The development of Web bots capable of exhibiting human-like browsing behavior has long been the goal of practitioners on both side of security spectrum - malicious hackers as well as security defenders. For malicious hackers such bots are an effective vehicle for bypassing various layers of system/network protection or for obstructing the operation of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs). For security defenders, the use of human-like behaving bots is shown to be of great importance in the process of system/network provisioning and testing. In the past, there have been many attempts at developing accurate models of human-like browsing behavior. However, most of these attempts/models suffer from one of following drawbacks: they either require that some previous history of actual human browsing on the target web-site be available (which often is not the case), or, they assume that 'think times' and 'page popularities' follow the well-known Poisson and Zipf distribution (an old hypothesis that does not hold well in the modern-day WWW). To our knowledge, our work is the first attempt at developing a model of human-like browsing behavior that requires no prior knowledge or assumption about human behavior on the target site. The model is founded on a more general theory that defines human behavior as an 'interest-driven' process. The preliminary simulation results are very encouraging - web bots built using our model are capable of mimicking real human browsing behavior 1000-fold better compared to bots that deploy random crawling strategy.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".