TSA-WF: Exploring the Effectiveness of Time Series Analysis for Website Fingerprinting

Website fingerprinting (WF) is a technique that allows an eavesdropper to determine the website a target user is accessing by inspecting the metadata associated with the packets she exchanges via some encrypted tunnel, e.g., Tor. Recent WF attacks built using machine learning (and deep learning) process and summarize trace metadata during their feature extraction phases. This methodology leads to predictions that lack information about the instant at which a given website is detected within a (potentially large) network trace comprised of multiple sequential website accesses -- a setting known as \textit{multi-tab} WF.