TSA-WF: Exploring the Effectiveness of Time Series Analysis for Website Fingerprinting
摘要
Website fingerprinting (WF) is a technique that allows an eavesdropper to determine the website a target user is accessing by inspecting the metadata associated with the packets she exchanges via some encrypted tunnel, e.g., Tor. In this paper, we explore whether classical time series analysis techniques can be effective in the WF setting. Specifically, we introduce TSA-WF, a pipeline designed to closely preserve network traces’ timing and direction characteristics, which enables the exploration of algorithms designed to measure time series similarity in the WF context. Our evaluation with Tor traces reveals that TSA-WF achieves a comparable accuracy to existing WF attacks in the single-tab setting. TSA-WF did not outperform existing attacks in the multi-tab setting, but was uniquely able to pinpoint the approximate instant at which a given website of interest was visited within a multi-tab trace.