The Tor anonymity system is vulnerable to website fingerprinting attacks that can reveal users Internet browsing behavior. The state-of-the-art website fingerprinting attacks use convolutional neural networks to automatically extract features from packet traces. One such attack undermines an efficient fingerprinting defense previously considered a candidate for implementation in Tor. In this work, we study the use of neural network attribution techniques to visualize activity in the attack's model. These visualizations, essentially heatmaps of the network, can be used to identify regions of particular sensitivity and provide insight into the features that the model has learned. We then examine how these heatmaps may be used to create a new website fingerprinting defense that applies random padding to the website trace with an emphasis towards highly fingerprintable regions. This defense reduces the attacker's accuracy from 98% to below 70% with a packet overhead of approximately 80%.
more »
« less
Poster: Video Fingerprinting in Tor
Over 8 million users rely on the Tor network each day to protect their anonymity online. Unfortunately, Tor has been shown to be vulnerable to the website fingerprinting attack, which allows an attacker to deduce the website a user is visiting based on patterns in their traffic. The state-of-the-art attacks leverage deep learning to achieve high classification accuracy using raw packet information. Work thus far, however, has examined only one type of media delivered over the Tor network: web pages, and mostly just home pages of sites. In this work, we instead investigate the fingerprintability of video content served over Tor. We collected a large new dataset of network traces for 50 YouTube videos of similar length. Our preliminary experiments utilizing a convolutional neural network model proposed in prior works has yielded promising classification results, achieving up to 55% accuracy. This shows the potential to unmask the individual videos that users are viewing over Tor, creating further privacy challenges to consider when defending against website fingerprinting attacks.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1816851
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10183025
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- CCS '19: Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 2629 to 2631
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Most privacy-conscious users utilize HTTPS and an anonymity network such as Tor to mask source and destination IP addresses. It has been shown that encrypted and anonymized network traffic traces can still leak information through a type of attack called a website fingerprinting (WF) attack. The adversary records the network traffic and is only able to observe the number of incoming and outgoing messages, the size of each message, and the time difference between messages. In previous work, the effectiveness of website fingerprinting has been shown to have an accuracy of over 90% when using Tor as the anonymity network. Thus, an Internet Service Provider can successfully identify the websites its users are visiting. One main concern about website fingerprinting is its practicality. The common assumption in most previous work is that a victim is visiting one website at a time and has access to the complete network trace of that website. However, this is not realistic. We propose two new algorithms to deal with situations when the victim visits one website after another (continuous visits) and visits another website in the middle of visiting one website (overlapping visits). We show that our algorithm gives an accuracy of 80% (compared to 63% in a previous work [24]) in finding the split point which is the start point for the second website in a trace. Using our proposed “splitting” algorithm, websites can be predicted with an accuracy of 70%. When two website visits are overlapping, the website fingerprinting accuracy falls dramatically. Using our proposed “sectioning” algorithm, the accuracy for predicting the website in overlapping visits improves from 22.80% to 70%. When part of the network trace is missing (either the beginning or the end), the accuracy when using our sectioning algorithm increases from 20% to over 60%.more » « less
-
Website fingerprinting attacks, which use statistical analysis on network traffic to compromise user privacy, have been shown to be effective even if the traffic is sent over anonymity-preserving networks such as Tor. The classical attack model used to evaluate website fingerprinting attacks assumes an on-path adversary, who can observe all traffic traveling between the user’s computer and the secure network. In this work we investigate these attacks under a different attack model, in which the adversary is capable of sending a small amount of malicious JavaScript code to the target user’s computer. The malicious code mounts a cache side-channel attack, which exploits the effects of contention on the CPU’s cache, to identify other websites being browsed. The effectiveness of this attack scenario has never been systematically analyzed, especially in the open-world model which assumes that the user is visiting a mix of both sensitive and non-sensitive sites. We show that cache website fingerprinting attacks in JavaScript are highly feasible. Specifically, we use machine learning techniques to classify traces of cache activity. Unlike prior works, which try to identify cache conflicts, our work measures the overall occupancy of the last-level cache. We show that our approach achieves high classification accuracy in both the open-world and the closed-world models. We further show that our attack is more resistant than network-based fingerprinting to the effects of response caching, and that our techniques are resilient both to network-based defenses and to side-channel countermeasures introduced to modern browsers as a response to the Spectre attack. To protect against cache-based website fingerprinting, new defense mechanisms must be introduced to privacy-sensitive browsers and websites. We investigate one such mechanism, and show that generating artificial cache activity reduces the effectiveness of the attack and completely eliminates it when used in the Tor Browsermore » « less
-
Abstract Recent advances in Deep Neural Network (DNN) architectures have received a great deal of attention due to their ability to outperform state-of-the-art machine learning techniques across a wide range of application, as well as automating the feature engineering process. In this paper, we broadly study the applicability of deep learning to website fingerprinting. First, we show that unsupervised DNNs can generate lowdimensional informative features that improve the performance of state-of-the-art website fingerprinting attacks. Second, when used as classifiers, we show that they can exceed performance of existing attacks across a range of application scenarios, including fingerprinting Tor website traces, fingerprinting search engine queries over Tor, defeating fingerprinting defenses, and fingerprinting TLS-encrypted websites. Finally, we investigate which site-level features of a website influence its fingerprintability by DNNs.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)Abstract We introduce Generative Adversarial Networks for Data-Limited Fingerprinting (GANDaLF), a new deep-learning-based technique to perform Website Fingerprinting (WF) on Tor traffic. In contrast to most earlier work on deep-learning for WF, GANDaLF is intended to work with few training samples, and achieves this goal through the use of a Generative Adversarial Network to generate a large set of “fake” data that helps to train a deep neural network in distinguishing between classes of actual training data. We evaluate GANDaLF in low-data scenarios including as few as 10 training instances per site, and in multiple settings, including fingerprinting of website index pages and fingerprinting of non-index pages within a site. GANDaLF achieves closed-world accuracy of 87% with just 20 instances per site (and 100 sites) in standard WF settings. In particular, GANDaLF can outperform Var-CNN and Triplet Fingerprinting (TF) across all settings in subpage fingerprinting. For example, GANDaLF outperforms TF by a 29% margin and Var-CNN by 38% for training sets using 20 instances per site.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3319535.3363273
