Peel the onion: Recognition of Android apps behind the Tor Network
This work reveals a vulnerability in Tor for Android app anonymity, which is a critical issue for mobile privacy and security.
The paper tackles the problem of deanonymizing Android apps using Tor through network traffic analysis, achieving a 97% accuracy in experiments.
In this work we show that Tor is vulnerable to app deanonymization attacks on Android devices through network traffic analysis. For this purpose, we describe a general methodology for performing an attack that allows to deanonymize the apps running on a target smartphone using Tor, which is the victim of the attack. Then, we discuss a Proof-of-Concept, implementing the methodology, that shows how the attack can be performed in practice and allows to assess the deanonymization accuracy that it is possible to achieve. While attacks against Tor anonymity have been already gained considerable attention in the context of website fingerprinting in desktop environments, to the best of our knowledge this is the first work that highlights Tor vulnerability to apps deanonymization attacks on Android devices. In our experiments we achieved an accuracy of 97%.