RBP: a website fingerprinting obfuscation method against intelligent fingerprinting attacks

Abstract

Edge computing has developed rapidly in recent years due to its advantages of low bandwidth overhead and low delay, but it also brings challenges in data security and privacy. Website fingerprinting (WF) is a passive traffic analysis attack that threatens website privacy which poses a great threat to user’s privacy and web security. It collects network packets generated while a user accesses website, and then uses a series of techniques to discover patterns of network packets to infer the type of website user accesses. Many anonymous networks such as Tor can meet the need of hide identity from users in network activities, but they are also threatened by WF attacks. In this paper, we propose a website fingerprinting obfuscation method against intelligent fingerprinting attacks, called Random Bidirectional Padding (RBP). It is a novel website fingerprinting defense technology based on time sampling and random bidirectional packets padding, which can covert the real packets distribution to destroy the Inter-Arrival Time (IAT) features in the traffic sequence and increase the difference between the datasets with random bidirectional virtual packets padding. We evaluate the defense against state-of-the-art website fingerprinting attacks in real scenarios, and show its effectiveness.