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DynaFlow: An Efficient Website Fingerprinting Defense Based on Dynamically-Adjusting Flows

David Lu,Sanjit Bhat,Albert Kwon,S. Devadas

2018 · DOI: 10.1145/3267323.3268960
45 Citations

TLDR

A new countermeasure, DynaFlow, based on dynamically-adjusting flows to protect against website fingerprinting, which provides a similar level of security as current state-of-the-art while being over 40% more efficient.

Abstract

Website fingerprinting attacks enable a local adversary to determine which website a Tor user visits. In recent years, several researchers have proposed defenses to counter these attacks. However, these defenses have shortcomings: many do not provide formal guarantees of security, incur high latency and bandwidth overheads, and require a frequently-updated database of website traffic patterns. In this work, we introduce a new countermeasure, DynaFlow, based on dynamically-adjusting flows to protect against website fingerprinting. DynaFlow provides a similar level of security as current state-of-the-art while being over 40% more efficient. At the same time, DynaFlow does not require a pre-established database and extends protection to dynamically-generated websites.