Tail Time Defense Against Website Fingerprinting Attacks

Abstract

In the past few years, many defense mechanisms have been proposed against website fingerprinting attacks. Walkie-Talkie (WT) built on top of the Tor network is known to be one of the most effective defense mechanisms. However, we observed that WT significantly increases the page loading time (time overhead) although the bandwidth overhead is not high. This paper analyzes the cause of the increased page loading time and presents a defending approach called Tail Time (TT), which addresses the problem by limiting the maximum time for which a pending request can block subsequent requests. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed TT defense can significantly reduce the page loading time while keeping the defense performance on par.