Unveiling the Digital Fingerprints: Analysis of Internet attacks based on website fingerprints

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Rexha, Blerim, Musa, Arbena, Vishi, Kamer, Martiri, Edlira
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866912017190748160
author Rexha, Blerim
Musa, Arbena
Vishi, Kamer
Martiri, Edlira
author_facet Rexha, Blerim
Musa, Arbena
Vishi, Kamer
Martiri, Edlira
contents Parallel to our physical activities our virtual presence also leaves behind our unique digital fingerprints, while navigating on the Internet. These digital fingerprints have the potential to unveil users' activities encompassing browsing history, utilized applications, and even devices employed during these engagements. Many Internet users tend to use web browsers that provide the highest privacy protection and anonymization such as Tor. The success of such privacy protection depends on the Tor feature to anonymize end-user IP addresses and other metadata that constructs the website fingerprint. In this paper, we show that using the newest machine learning algorithms an attacker can deanonymize Tor traffic by applying such techniques. In our experimental framework, we establish a baseline and comparative reference point using a publicly available dataset from Universidad Del Cauca, Colombia. We capture network packets across 11 days, while users navigate specific web pages, recording data in .pcapng format through the Wireshark network capture tool. Excluding extraneous packets, we employ various machine learning algorithms in our analysis. The results show that the Gradient Boosting Machine algorithm delivers the best outcomes in binary classification, achieving an accuracy of 0.8363. In the realm of multi-class classification, the Random Forest algorithm attains an accuracy of 0.6297.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_03791
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unveiling the Digital Fingerprints: Analysis of Internet attacks based on website fingerprints
Rexha, Blerim
Musa, Arbena
Vishi, Kamer
Martiri, Edlira
Cryptography and Security
Parallel to our physical activities our virtual presence also leaves behind our unique digital fingerprints, while navigating on the Internet. These digital fingerprints have the potential to unveil users' activities encompassing browsing history, utilized applications, and even devices employed during these engagements. Many Internet users tend to use web browsers that provide the highest privacy protection and anonymization such as Tor. The success of such privacy protection depends on the Tor feature to anonymize end-user IP addresses and other metadata that constructs the website fingerprint. In this paper, we show that using the newest machine learning algorithms an attacker can deanonymize Tor traffic by applying such techniques. In our experimental framework, we establish a baseline and comparative reference point using a publicly available dataset from Universidad Del Cauca, Colombia. We capture network packets across 11 days, while users navigate specific web pages, recording data in .pcapng format through the Wireshark network capture tool. Excluding extraneous packets, we employ various machine learning algorithms in our analysis. The results show that the Gradient Boosting Machine algorithm delivers the best outcomes in binary classification, achieving an accuracy of 0.8363. In the realm of multi-class classification, the Random Forest algorithm attains an accuracy of 0.6297.
title Unveiling the Digital Fingerprints: Analysis of Internet attacks based on website fingerprints
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.03791