Beyond a Single Perspective: Towards a Realistic Evaluation of Website Fingerprinting Attacks

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14283v1
• Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2025 04:14:17 GMT
• Title: Beyond a Single Perspective: Towards a Realistic Evaluation of Website Fingerprinting Attacks
• Authors: Xinhao Deng, Jingyou Chen, Linxiao Yu, Yixiang Zhang, Zhongyi Gu, Changhao Qiu, Xiyuan Zhao, Ke Xu, Qi Li,
• Abstract summary: Website Fingerprinting (WF) attacks exploit patterns in encrypted traffic to infer the websites visited by users.<n>WF techniques achieve over 90% accuracy in controlled experimental settings.<n>This paper presents the first systematic and comprehensive evaluation of existing WF attacks under diverse realistic conditions.
• Score: 12.990922744613293
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Website Fingerprinting (WF) attacks exploit patterns in encrypted traffic to infer the websites visited by users, posing a serious threat to anonymous communication systems. Although recent WF techniques achieve over 90% accuracy in controlled experimental settings, most studies remain confined to single scenarios, overlooking the complexity of real-world environments. This paper presents the first systematic and comprehensive evaluation of existing WF attacks under diverse realistic conditions, including defense mechanisms, traffic drift, multi-tab browsing, early-stage detection, open-world settings, and few-shot scenarios. Experimental results show that many WF techniques with strong performance in isolated settings degrade significantly when facing other conditions. Since real-world environments often combine multiple challenges, current WF attacks are difficult to apply directly in practice. This study highlights the limitations of WF attacks and introduces a multidimensional evaluation framework, offering critical insights for developing more robust and practical WF attacks.

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