PhD Seminar • Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP) • Exploring the Effectiveness of Time Series Analysis for Website Fingerprinting

Please note: This PhD seminar will take place online.

Michael Wrana, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Supervisor: Professor Diogo Barradas

In this work, we explore whether classical time series analysis techniques can be effective in the WF setting. Specifically, we introduce TSA-WF, a pipeline designed to closely preserve network traces’ timing and direction characteristics, which enables the exploration of algorithms designed to measure time series similarity in the WF context. Our evaluation with Tor traces reveals that TSA-WF achieves a comparable accuracy to existing WF attacks in scenarios where website accesses can be easily singled-out from a given trace (i.e., the single-tab WF setting), even when shielded by specially designed WF defenses.

Attend this PhD seminar virtually on MS Teams.