A comprehensive analysis of website fingerprinting defenses on Tor

Website fingerprinting (WF) enables eavesdroppers to identify the website a user is visiting by network surveillance, even if the traffic is protected by anonymous communication technologies such as Tor. To avoid this, several defense schemes have been proposed to protect users from the hazard of website fingerprinting attacks. However, some defenses are defeated by new attacks soon since they can not provide provable security guarantees; some defenses can not be deployed in practice since they incur high bandwidth overhead and latency overhead. In this paper, we survey existing WF defense schemes and make a comprehensive analysis. First, we divide WF defenses into four categories and introduce their principles and characteristics separately. Then, we point out some unreasonable settings in previous works and use a new experimental setting to evaluate WF defenses on a public dataset. We find many WF defenses are not as effective as they claim to be. Besides, we investigate the deployment of WF defenses and discuss some potential problems. Finally, we make some suggestions for researchers to design a feasible WF defense and make suggestions for users to protect their privacy.

Automated summary

This paper surveys and analyzes existing website fingerprinting (WF) defense schemes. It categorizes WF defenses into four categories and explains their principles and characteristics. The effectiveness of WF defenses is evaluated on a public dataset using a new experimental setting, finding that many defenses are not as effective as claimed. Deployment issues of WF defenses are discussed, and suggestions are provided for researchers and users.