[tor-project] Constructing a real-world dataset for studying website fingerprinting

[Jansen, Robert G CIV USN NRL (5543) Washington DC (USA)]

> On Apr 24, 2023, at 6:40 PM, Tobias Pulls <tobias.pulls at kau.se> wrote:
> 
> More refined labeling please!
> 

Understood. We’ll consider your feedback and see if we might be able to safely produce more informative labels.

> It's not a replacement for implementations and real-defended datasets though, I hope we can agree on?
[snip]
> We want more implemented and ultimately deployed defenses, right?

I absolutely agree!

Our dataset might be more immediately useful for evaluating attacks, but I don’t see how it hurts our ability to evaluate defenses. Defenses should still be implemented and evaluated in network-wide tests as before [0]. The best way I know how to do that is to first use Shadow for full network testing of a variety of candidate defenses before moving the best to the live Tor network. And I think our dataset could help make the Shadow part more realistic.

Peace, love, and positivity,
Rob

[0] "Padding-only Defenses Add Delay in Tor”
https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~hoppernj/padding_delay_wpes.pdf