WFGuard: an Effective Fuzzing-testing-based Traffic Morphing Defense against Website Fingerprinting
Zhen Ling, Gui Xiao, Lan Luo, Rong Wang, Xiangyu Xu, Guangchi Liu · 2024
Website fingerprinting (WF) attack is a type of traffic analysis attack. It enables a local and passive eavesdropper situated between the Tor client and the Tor entry node to deduce which websites the client is visiting. Currently, deep learning (DL) based WF attacks have overcome a number of proposed WF defenses, demonstrating superior performance compared to traditional machine learning (ML) based WF attacks. To mitigate this threat, we present WFGuard, a fuzzing-testing-based traffic morphing WF defense technique. WFGuard employs fine-grained neuron information within WF classifiers to design a joint optimization function and then applies gradient ascent to maximize both neurons value and misclassification possibility in DL-based WF classifiers. During each traffic mutation cycle, we propose a gradient based dummy traffic injection pattern generation approach, continuously mutating the traffic until a pattern emerges that can successfully deceive the classifier. Finally, the pattern present in successful variant traces are extracted and applied as defense strategies to Tor traffic. Extensive evaluations reveal that WFGuard can effectively decrease the accuracy of DL-based WF classifiers (e.g., DF and Var-CNN) to a mere 4.43%, while only incurring an 11.04% bandwidth overhead. This highlights the potential efficacy of our approach in mitigating WF attacks.