[tor-dev] Pluggable-transport implementations of your website fingerprinting defenses

David Fifield david at bamsoftware.com
Sun Nov 9 22:33:57 UTC 2014


NB I'm copying the tor-dev mailing list on this message.

At CCS I saw Rishab present these papers:

"CS-BuFLO: A Congestion Sensitive Website Fingerprinting Defense"
http://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/~rnithyanand/pubs/wpes2014-csb.pdf
"Glove: A Bespoke Website Fingerprinting Defense"
http://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/~rnithyanand/pubs/wpes2014-glove.pdf
"A Systematic Approach to Developing and Evaluating Website Fingerprinting Defenses"
http://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/~rnithyanand/pubs/ccs2014.pdf

I spoke quite a lot to Rishab and suggested, since these schemes have
source code, that they be wrapped in a pluggable transports interface so
they can be easily used by tor clients. It is not super difficult to
turn a network program into a pluggable transport, as there are
libraries like pyptlib and liballium that implement the internal
pluggable transports protocol. You might be familiar with wfpadtools
(https://bitbucket.org/mjuarezm/obfsproxy-wfpadtools), which aims to
make it easy to prototype fingerprinting defenses by specifying them in
terms of (e.g. padding) primitives.

I looked for the source code mentioned in the papers and I wasn't sure
what would be best to use. I found
	https://crysp.uwaterloo.ca/software/webfingerprint/
which links to some short Python files like
	https://crysp.uwaterloo.ca/software/webfingerprint/tamaraw.py
There is also
	https://github.com/xiang-cai/CSBuFLO
but it doesn't appear to be directly usable. It appears to be a modified
OpenSSH, without a commit history showing what was modified.

What source code do you recommend for an implementation?

David Fifield


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