Var-CNN: A Data-Efficient Website Fingerprinting Attack Based on Deep Learning

Abstract

In recent years, there have been several works that use website fingerprinting techniques to enable a local adversary to determine which website a Tor user visits. While the current state-of-the-art attack, which uses deep learning, outperforms prior art with medium to large amounts of data, it attains marginal to no accuracy improvements when both use small amounts of training data. In this work, we propose Var-CNN, a website fingerprinting attack that leverages deep learning techniques along with novel insights specific to packet sequence classification. In open-world settings with large amounts of data, Var-CNN attains over $1\%$ higher true positive rate (TPR) than state-of-the-art attacks while achieving $4\times$ lower false positive rate (FPR). Var-CNN's improvements are especially notable in low-data scenarios, where it reduces the FPR of prior art by $3.12\%$ while increasing the TPR by $13\%$. Overall, insights used to develop Var-CNN can be applied to future deep learning based attacks, and substantially reduce the amount of training data needed to perform a successful website fingerprinting attack. This shortens the time needed for data collection and lowers the likelihood of having data staleness issues.

arXiv commentOriginal paper split into "Var-CNN: A Data-Efficient Website Fingerprinting Attack Based on Deep Learning" (PETS 2019) and "DynaFlow: An Efficient Website Fingerprinting Defense Based on Dynamically-Adjusting Flows" (WPES 2018)

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Tik-Tok: The Utility of Packet Timing in Website Fingerprinting Attacks
• Extensible Machine Learning for Encrypted Network Traffic Application Labeling via Uncertainty Quantification
• Deep Fingerprinting: Undermining Website Fingerprinting Defenses with Deep Learning
• A Federated Learning Approach for Mobile Packet Classification
• A Real-time Defense against Website Fingerprinting Attacks
• Leveraging strategic connection migration-powered traffic splitting for privacy
• WFDefProxy: Modularly Implementing and Empirically Evaluating Website Fingerprinting Defenses
• Fingerprinting Encrypted Voice Traffic on Smart Speakers with Deep Learning
• Few-Shot Website Fingerprinting Attack
• Towards Effective and Efficient Padding Machines for Tor