Measuring Information Leakage in Website Fingerprinting Attacks and Defenses
This work addresses the issue of privacy vulnerabilities in anonymous networks like Tor for users seeking uncensored access, but it is incremental as it focuses on measurement rather than introducing new defenses.
The researchers tackled the problem of measuring information leakage in Tor's website fingerprinting attacks and defenses by developing a methodology and tools to quantify leaked information, applying it to a comprehensive set of features from many websites and defense mechanisms to enable fine-grained analysis.
Tor provides low-latency anonymous and uncensored network access against a local or network adversary. Due to the design choice to minimize traffic overhead (and increase the pool of potential users) Tor allows some information about the client's connections to leak. Attacks using (features extracted from) this information to infer the website a user visits are called Website Fingerprinting (WF) attacks. We develop a methodology and tools to measure the amount of leaked information about a website. We apply this tool to a comprehensive set of features extracted from a large set of websites and WF defense mechanisms, allowing us to make more fine-grained observations about WF attacks and defenses.