The Effectiveness of Privacy Enhancing Technologies against Fingerprinting
This research addresses the problem of online privacy for users by evaluating PETs against fingerprinting, though it is incremental as it builds on existing measurement methods.
The study measured the effectiveness of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) in protecting users from website fingerprinting, finding that the Tor Browser Bundle was the most effective among those tested, while some PETs had inconsistent behaviors that could be harmful.
We measure how effective Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) are at protecting users from website fingerprinting. Our measurements use both experimental and observational methods. Experimental methods allow control, precision, and use on new PETs that currently lack a user base. Observational methods enable scale and drawing from the browsers currently in real-world use. By applying experimentally created models of a PET's behavior to an observational data set, our novel hybrid method offers the best of both worlds. We find the Tor Browser Bundle to be the most effective PET amongst the set we tested. We find that some PETs have inconsistent behaviors, which can do more harm than good.