A Practical Website Fingerprinting Attack via CNN-Based Transfer Learning

Tianyao Pan, Zejia Tang and Dawei Xu ()
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Tianyao Pan: School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China
Zejia Tang: School of Cyberspace Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China
Dawei Xu: College of Cybersecurity, Changchun University, Changchun 130022, China

Mathematics, 2023, vol. 11, issue 19, 1-19

Abstract: Website fingerprinting attacks attempt to apply deep learning technology to identify websites corresponding to encrypted traffic data. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, once the total number of encrypted traffic data becomes insufficient, the identification accuracy in most existing works will drop dramatically. This phenomenon grows worse because the statistical features of the encrypted traffic data are not always stable but irregularly varying in different time periods. Even a deep learning model requires good performance to capture the statistical features, its accuracy usually diminishes in a short period of time because the changes of the statistical features technically put the training and testing data into two non-identical distributions. In this paper, we first propose a convolutional neural network-based website fingerprinting attack (CWFA) scheme. This scheme integrates packet direction with the timing sequence from the encrypted traffic data to improve the accuracy of analysis as much as possible on few data samples. We then design a new fine-tuning mechanism for the CWFA (FM-CWFA) scheme based on transfer learning. This mechanism enables the proposed FM-CWFA scheme to support the changes in the statistical patterns. The experimental results in closed-world and open-world settings show that the effectiveness of the CWFA scheme is better than previous researches, with the slowest performance degradation when the number of data decreases, and the FM-CWFA scheme can remain effective when the statistical features change.

Keywords: website fingerprinting attack; convolutional neural network; fine-tuning mechanism; transfer learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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