165 research outputs found
Website Fingerprinting: Attacks and Defenses
Website fingerprinting attacks allow a local, passive eavesdropper to determine a client's web activity by leveraging features from her packet sequence. These attacks break the privacy expected by users of privacy technologies, including low-latency anonymity networks such as proxies, VPNs, or Tor. As a discipline, website fingerprinting is an application of machine learning techniques to the diverse field of privacy.
To perform a website fingerprinting attack, the eavesdropping attacker passively records the time, direction, and size of the client's packets. Then, he uses a machine learning algorithm to classify the packet sequence so as to determine the web page it came from. In this work we construct and evaluate three new website fingerprinting attacks: Wa-OSAD, an attack using a modified edit distance as the kernel of a Support Vector Machine, achieving greater accuracy than attacks before it; Wa-FLev, an attack that quickly approximates an edit distance computation, allowing a low-resource attacker to deanonymize many clients at once; and Wa-kNN, the current state-of-the-art attack, which is effective and fast, with a very low false positive rate in the open-world scenario.
While our new attacks perform well in theoretical scenarios, there are significant differences between the situation in the wild and in the laboratory. Specifically, we tackle concerns regarding the freshness of the training set, splitting packet sequences so that each part corresponds to one web page access (for easy classification), and removing misleading noise from the packet sequence.
To defend ourselves against such attacks, we need defenses that are both efficient and provable. We rigorously define and motivate the notion of a provable defense in this work, and we present three new provable defenses: Tamaraw, which is a relatively efficient way to flood the channel with fixed-rate packet scheduling; Supersequence, which uses smallest common supersequences to save on bandwidth overhead; and Walkie-Talkie, which uses half-duplex communication to significantly reduce both bandwidth and time overhead, allowing a truly efficient yet provable defense
How Unique is Your .onion? An Analysis of the Fingerprintability of Tor Onion Services
Recent studies have shown that Tor onion (hidden) service websites are
particularly vulnerable to website fingerprinting attacks due to their limited
number and sensitive nature. In this work we present a multi-level feature
analysis of onion site fingerprintability, considering three state-of-the-art
website fingerprinting methods and 482 Tor onion services, making this the
largest analysis of this kind completed on onion services to date.
Prior studies typically report average performance results for a given
website fingerprinting method or countermeasure. We investigate which sites are
more or less vulnerable to fingerprinting and which features make them so. We
find that there is a high variability in the rate at which sites are classified
(and misclassified) by these attacks, implying that average performance figures
may not be informative of the risks that website fingerprinting attacks pose to
particular sites.
We analyze the features exploited by the different website fingerprinting
methods and discuss what makes onion service sites more or less easily
identifiable, both in terms of their traffic traces as well as their webpage
design. We study misclassifications to understand how onion service sites can
be redesigned to be less vulnerable to website fingerprinting attacks. Our
results also inform the design of website fingerprinting countermeasures and
their evaluation considering disparate impact across sites.Comment: Accepted by ACM CCS 201
k-fingerprinting: a Robust Scalable Website Fingerprinting Technique
Website fingerprinting enables an attacker to infer which web page a client
is browsing through encrypted or anonymized network connections. We present a
new website fingerprinting technique based on random decision forests and
evaluate performance over standard web pages as well as Tor hidden services, on
a larger scale than previous works. Our technique, k-fingerprinting, performs
better than current state-of-the-art attacks even against website
fingerprinting defenses, and we show that it is possible to launch a website
fingerprinting attack in the face of a large amount of noisy data. We can
correctly determine which of 30 monitored hidden services a client is visiting
with 85% true positive rate (TPR), a false positive rate (FPR) as low as 0.02%,
from a world size of 100,000 unmonitored web pages. We further show that error
rates vary widely between web resources, and thus some patterns of use will be
predictably more vulnerable to attack than others.Comment: 17 page
Mockingbird: Defending Against Deep-Learning-Based Website Fingerprinting Attacks with Adversarial Traces
Website Fingerprinting (WF) is a type of traffic analysis attack that enables
a local passive eavesdropper to infer the victim's activity, even when the
traffic is protected by a VPN or an anonymity system like Tor. Leveraging a
deep-learning classifier, a WF attacker can gain over 98% accuracy on Tor
traffic. In this paper, we explore a novel defense, Mockingbird, based on the
idea of adversarial examples that have been shown to undermine machine-learning
classifiers in other domains. Since the attacker gets to design and train his
attack classifier based on the defense, we first demonstrate that at a
straightforward technique for generating adversarial-example based traces fails
to protect against an attacker using adversarial training for robust
classification. We then propose Mockingbird, a technique for generating traces
that resists adversarial training by moving randomly in the space of viable
traces and not following more predictable gradients. The technique drops the
accuracy of the state-of-the-art attack hardened with adversarial training from
98% to 42-58% while incurring only 58% bandwidth overhead. The attack accuracy
is generally lower than state-of-the-art defenses, and much lower when
considering Top-2 accuracy, while incurring lower bandwidth overheads.Comment: 18 pages, 13 figures and 8 Tables. Accepted in IEEE Transactions on
Information Forensics and Security (TIFS
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