Website Fingerprinting Attacks and Defenses

PhD Qualifying Examination


Title: "Website Fingerprinting Attacks and Defenses"

by

Mr. Jiajun GONG


Abstract:

Website fingerprinting (WF) attacks pose a great threat to user privacy on 
anonymity networks. It is a kind of traffic analysis attack, where a local 
attack passively eavesdrops in network traffic to find out which webpage a 
client is visiting. They succeeds in doing so by extracting features from 
the collected traffic such as the number of outgoing and incoming packets, 
packet timing and the ordering of packets. They can be used by network 
surveillants to break the privacy guarantee of those anonymity networks. 
What makes WF attacks even threatening is that the local passive 
eavesdropper is virtually impossible to detect. A lot of WF attacks based 
on various machine learning or deep learning models have been proposed. 
They proves to be extremely effective against current anonymity networks.

To mitigate the threat of WF attacks, a lot of defenses have been put 
forward. They can be generally categorized into three classes: obfuscation 
defense that obfuscates specific features WF attacks rely on, confusion 
defense that makes it difficult to determine which of a given set of given 
packet sequences is loaded and regularization defense that restricts how 
clients send and receive packets to limit the features useful to 
attackers. However, they are either too expensive to deploy in reality or 
not strong enough to defeat all the attacks. Cheap while effective 
defenses are still urgently wanted.

In this survey, we investigate existing WF attacks and defenses in depth. 
We analyse their strengths and weaknesses. We believe our survey will shed 
light to future work on Website Fingerprinting.


Date:			Wednesday, 8 May 2019

Time:                  	3:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:                  Room 4472
                         Lifts 25/26

Committee Members:	Dr. Tao Wang (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Shing-Chi Cheung (Chairperson)
 			Prof. Cunsheng Ding
 			Dr. Raymond Wong


**** ALL are Welcome ****