Fingerprinting websites using remote traffic analysis
Xun Gong, Negar Kiyavash, Nikita Borisov · 2010
Recent work has shown that traffic analysis of data carried on encrypted tunnels can be used to recover important semantic information. As one example, attackers can find out which website, or which page on a website, a user is accessing simply by monitoring the traffic patterns. We show that traffic analysis is a much greater threat to privacy than previously thought, as such attacks can be carried out remotely. In particular, we show that, to perform traffic analysis, adversaries do not need to directly observe the traffic patterns. Instead, they can send probes from a far-off vantage point that exploit a queuing side channel in routers.