Researchers Demonstrate New Fingerprinting Attack on Tor Encrypted Traffic

guest · Nov 15, 2021

Researchers Demonstrate New Fingerprinting Attack on Tor Encrypted Traffic
November 15, 2021
https://thehackernews.com/2021/11/researchers-demonstrate-new.html

A new analysis of website fingerprinting (WF) attacks aimed at the Tor web browser has revealed that it's possible for an adversary to glean a website frequented by a victim, but only in scenarios where the threat actor is interested in a specific subset of the websites visited by users.

"While attacks can exceed 95% accuracy when monitoring a small set of five popular websites, indiscriminate (non-targeted) attacks against sets of 25 and 100 websites fail to exceed an accuracy of 80% and 60%, respectively," researchers Giovanni Cherubin, Rob Jansen, and Carmela Troncoso said in a newly published paper.
Tor browser offers "unlinkable communication" to its users by routing internet traffic through an overlay network, consisting of more than six thousand relays, with the goal of anonymizing the originating location and usage from third parties conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis. It achieves this by building a circuit that traverses via an entry, middle, and exit relay, before forwarding the requests to the destination IP addresses.
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Website fingerprinting attacks on Tor aim to break these anonymity protections and enable an adversary observing the encrypted traffic patterns between a victim and the Tor network to predict the website visited by the victim.

"In other words, untargetted adversaries that aim to generally monitor users' website visits will fail, but focused adversaries that target one particular client configuration and website may succeed."
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Online Website Fingerprinting: Evaluating Website Fingerprinting Attacks on Tor in the Real World

We achieve this by adapting the state-of-the-art Triplet Fingerprinting attack to an online setting and training the WF models on data safely collected on a Tor exit relay—a setup an adversary can easily deploy in practice. By studying WF under realistic conditions, we demonstrate that an adversary can achieve a WF classification accuracy of above 95% when monitoring a small set of 5 popular websites, but that accuracy quickly degrades to less than 80% when monitoring as few as 25 websites.

We conclude that, although WF attacks may be possible, it is likely infeasible to carry them out in the real world while monitoring more than a small set of websites.
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Researchers Demonstrate New Fingerprinting Attack on Tor Encrypted Traffic

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