Paper Info
Title
An empirical study of web browsers' resistance to traffic analysis and website fingerprinting attacks.
Abstract
Anonymity protocols are employed to establish encrypted tunnels to protect the privacy of Internet users from traffic analysis attacks. However, the attackers strive to infer some traffic patterns’ characteristics (e.g. packet directions, packet sizes, inter-packet timing, etc.) in order to expose the identities of Internet users and their activities. A recent and popular traffic analysis attack is called website fingerprinting which reveals the identity of websites visited by target users. Existing work in the literature studied the website fingerprinting attack using a single web browser, namely Firefox. In this paper we propose a unified traffic analysis attack model composed of a sequence of phases that demonstrate the efficiency of website fingerprinting attack using popular web browsers under Tor (The Onion Router). In addition, we reveal the main factors that affect the accuracy of website fingerprinting attack over Tor anonymous system and using different browsers. To the best of our knowledge, no previous study uncovered such factors by deploying real-world traffic analysis attack utilizing the top five web browsers. The outcomes of the research are very relevant to Internet users (individuals/companies/governments) since they allow to assess to which extent their privacy is preserved in presence of traffic analysis attacks, in particular, website fingerprinting over different browsers. A recommendation for future research direction regarding the investigation of website fingerprinting over different scenarios is also provided.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1007/s10586-018-2817-4
Cluster Computing
Keywords
Field
DocType
User privacy, Anonymity system, Traffic analysis, Website fingerprinting, Web browsers
World Wide Web,Attack model,Traffic analysis,Computer science,Network packet,Encryption,Router,Anonymity,Empirical research,Distributed computing,The Internet
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
21
4
1386-7857
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
18
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Taher Al-Shehari100.34
sami zhioua27213.00