Online Advertising a Software Infrastructure for Authenticated Web Metering

P u b l i s h e d b y t h e I E E E C o m p u t e r S o c i e t y nizations might be tempted to inflate the number of registered accesses. Even a trusted host site can generate statistics that do not correspond to real usage. 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. Auditing companies base their measures of a Web site’s popularity on statistics or market surveys. 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.