RLpatch: A Robust Low-Overhead Website Fingerprinting Defense Method Based on Reinforcement Learning Within Sensitive Regions

Website Fingerprinting (WF) attacks have posed a serious threat to the anonymity of the onion router (Tor) communication system, as attackers can passively pry into the encrypted traffic and infer the website visited by users. To defend against WF, recent studies focus on adversarial perturbations. However, most of them suffer from a high bandwidth overhead and a low defense performance. To address this problem, our basic idea is to generate perturbation only on the sensitive regions, which can effectively mask the website’s fingerprint, thus misleading the WF attack models and reducing the bandwidth overhead. In this paper, we formulate a joint optimization problem of perturbation position and magnitude by confining the perturbations within sensitive regions, which is rarely considered in the literature. We propose a robust low-overhead WF defense method based on reinforcement learning (RL), named RLpatch. RLpatch identifies the common sensitive regions of various surrogate models and adjusts perturbation according to the query result from a query WF model. It further employs the positional frequency of perturbations to generate a common perturbation paradigm for different traces of a same website. Experimental results show that RLpatch achieves higher defense performance, lower bandwidth overhead and better robustness against adversarial training compared to the state-of-the-art methods.