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Delay-Conscious Defense Against Fingerprinting Attacks

Authors:
Jingyuan Liang
Chansu Yu
Kyoungwon Suh

Keywords: Website fingerprinting; Censorship; Tor; Machine learning; User perceived experience

Abstract:
In the past few years, many defense mechanisms have been proposed against website fingerprinting attacks. Walkie-Talkie (WT) built on top of Tor network is known to be one of the most effective and efficient defense mechanisms. However, we observed that WT significantly increases page loading times (time overhead) while adding little bandwidth overhead compared to other approaches. We analyze the cause of the increased page loading time and present a defending approach called Tail Timeout (TT), which addresses the problem, by introducing a timeout mechanism limiting the maximum time for which a pending request can block subsequent requests. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed TT defense can significantly reduce the page loading time while keeping similar defense performance in terms of true positive and true negative ratios achieved by WT.

Pages: 15 to 21

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2020

Publication date: February 23, 2020

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4413

ISBN: 978-1-61208-770-2

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

Dates: from February 23, 2020 to February 27, 2020