Dynaflow: An efficient website fingerprinting defense based on dynamically-adjusting flows

D Lu, S Bhat, A Kwon, S Devadas - … of the 2018 Workshop on Privacy in …, 2018 - dl.acm.org
Proceedings of the 2018 Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society, 2018dl.acm.org
Website fingerprinting attacks enable a local adversary to determine which website a Tor
user visits. In recent years, several researchers have proposed defenses to counter these
attacks. However, these defenses have shortcomings: many do not provide formal
guarantees of security, incur high latency and bandwidth overheads, and require a
frequently-updated database of website traffic patterns. In this work, we introduce a new
countermeasure, DynaFlow, based on dynamically-adjusting flows to protect against …
Website fingerprinting attacks enable a local adversary to determine which website a Tor user visits. In recent years, several researchers have proposed defenses to counter these attacks. However, these defenses have shortcomings: many do not provide formal guarantees of security, incur high latency and bandwidth overheads, and require a frequently-updated database of website traffic patterns. In this work, we introduce a new countermeasure, DynaFlow, based on dynamically-adjusting flows to protect against website fingerprinting. DynaFlow provides a similar level of security as current state-of-the-art while being over 40% more efficient. At the same time, DynaFlow does not require a pre-established database and extends protection to dynamically-generated websites.
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