Abstract-The website fingerprinting attack aims to identify the content (i.e., a webpage accessed by a client) of encrypted and anonymized connections by observing patterns of data flows such as packet size and direction. This attack can be performed by a local passive eavesdropper -one of the weakest adversaries in the attacker model of anonymization networks such as Tor.In this paper, we present a novel website fingerprinting attack. Based on a simple and comprehensible idea, our approach outperforms all state-of-the-art methods in terms of classification accuracy while being computationally dramatically more efficient. In order to evaluate the severity of the website fingerprinting attack in reality, we collected the most representative dataset that has ever been built, where we avoid simplified assumptions made in the related work regarding selection and type of webpages and the size of the universe. Using this data, we explore the practical limits of website fingerprinting at Internet scale. Although our novel approach is by orders of magnitude computationally more efficient and superior in terms of detection accuracy, for the first time we show that no existing method -including our own -scales when applied in realistic settings. With our analysis, we explore neglected aspects of the attack and investigate the realistic probability of success for different strategies a real-world adversary may follow.

Low-latency anonymization networks such as Tor and JAP claim to hide the recipient and the content of communications from a local observer, i.e., an entity that can eavesdrop the traffic between the user and the first anonymization node. Especially users in totalitarian regimes strongly depend on such networks to freely communicate. For these people, anonymity is particularly important and an analysis of the anonymization methods against various attacks is necessary to ensure adequate protection. In this paper we show that anonymity in Tor and JAP is not as strong as expected so far and cannot resist website fingerprinting attacks under certain circumstances. We first define features for website fingerprinting solely based on volume, time, and direction of the traffic. As a result, the subsequent classification becomes much easier. We apply support vector machines with the introduced features. We are able to improve recognition results of existing works on a given state-of-the-art dataset in Tor from 3% to 55% and in JAP from 20% to 80%. The datasets assume a closed-world with 775 websites only. In a next step, we transfer our findings to a more complex and realistic open-world scenario, i.e., recognition of several websites in a set of thousands of random unknown websites. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first successful attack in the open-world scenario. We achieve a surprisingly high true positive rate of up to 73% for a false positive rate of 0.05%. Finally, we show preliminary results of a proof-of-concept implementation that applies camouflage as a countermeasure to hamper the fingerprinting attack. For JAP, the detection rate decreases from 80% to 4% and for Tor it drops from 55% to about 3%.

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The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the de facto standard interdomain routing protocol. Despite its critical role on the Internet, it does not provide any security guarantees. In response to this, a large amount of research has proposed a wide variety BGP security extensions and detection-recovery systems in recent decades. Nevertheless, BGP remains vulnerable to many types of attack. In this work, we conduct an up-to-date review of fundamental BGP threats and present a methodology for evaluation of existing BGP security proposals. Based on this, we introduce a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of proposals intended to make BGP secure and methods for detection and mitigation of routing instabilities. Last but not least, we identify gaps in research, and pinpoint open issues and unsolved challenges.

Providing anonymity for users on the Internet is a very challenging and difficult task. Currently there are only a few systems that are of practical relevance for the provision of low-latency anonymity. One of the most important to mention is Tor which is based on onion routing. Practical client usage of Tor often leads to delays that are not tolerated by the average end-user, which, in return, discourages many of them from using the system. In this paper we propose new methods of path selection that allow performance-improved onion routing. These are based on actively measured latencies and estimations of available link-wise capacities using passive observations of throughput. We evaluate the proposed methods in the public Tor network and present a practical approach to empirically analyze the strength of anonymity certain methods of path selection provide in comparison to each other.