Adaptive Fingerprinting: Website Fingerprinting over Few Encrypted Traffic

ABSTRACTWebsite fingerprinting attacks can infer which website a user visits over encrypted network traffic. Recent studies can achieve high accuracy (e.g., 98%) by leveraging deep neural networks. However, current attacks rely on enormous encrypted traffic data, which are time-consuming to collect. Moreover, large-scale encrypted traffic data also need to be recollected frequently to adjust the changes in the website content. In other words, the bootstrap time for carrying out website fingerprinting is not practical. In this paper, we propose a new method, named Adaptive Fingerprinting, which can derive high attack accuracy over few encrypted traffic by leveraging adversarial domain adaption. With our method, an attacker only needs to collect few traffic rather than large-scale datasets, which makes website fingerprinting more practical in the real world. Our extensive experimental results over multiple datasets show that our method can achieve 89% accuracy over few encrypted traffic in the closed-world setting and 99% precision and 99% recall in the open-world setting. Compared to a recent study (named Triplet Fingerprinting), our method is much more efficient in pre-training time and is more scalable. Moreover, the attack performance of our method can outperform Triplet Fingerprinting in both the closed-world evaluation and open-world evaluation.