Investigating the Streaming Algorithms Usage in Website Fingerprinting Attack Against Tor Privacy Enhancing Technology

Abstract

Website fingerprinting attack is a kind of traffic analysis attack that aims to identify the URL of visited websites using the Tor browser. Previous website fingerprinting attacks were based on batch learning methods which assumed that the traffic traces of each website are independent and generated from the stationary probability distribution. But, in realistic scenarios, the websites' concepts can change over time (dynamic websites) that is known as concept drift. To deal with data whose distribution change over time, the classifier model must update its model permanently and be adaptive to concept drift. Streaming algorithms are dynamic models that have these features and lead us to make a comparison of various representative data stream classification algorithms for website fingerprinting. Given to our experiments and results, by considering streaming algorithms along with statistical flow-based network traffic features, the accuracy grows significantly.