Poster: On Website Fingerprinting Defenses and User Tolerances

Website Fingerprinting (WF) attacks are attacks in which an adversary uses the metadata of encrypted and anonymized packets to build fingerprints for websites and determine user behavior, without attacking the underlying encryption. Typical defenses add padding/noise to the entirety of a data transmission, reducing attack accuracy at the cost of significant bandwidth overhead. We propose a new type of defense, where padding is only added to the most identifiable part of a transmission. We call for, and expect this research to be a part of, a larger discussion on WF defenses, which make more realistic assumptions about the average user.