Silk Road forums
Discussion => Newbie discussion => Topic started by: SirNomDePlum on July 19, 2013, 12:01 pm
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Questions:
What does "website traffic fingerprinting" mean exactly? If I were attacked in this way what information could one get from me?
According to this - https://blog.torproject.org/blog/experimental-defense-website-traffic-fingerprinting *Clearnet link* - website fingerprinting is the act of recognizing web traffic through surveillance despite the use of encryption (SSL or HTTPS) or anonymizing software.
What do they mean by "recognizing web traffic"?
Are these studies true?
http://guh.nu/projects/ta/safeweb/safeweb.pdf *Clearnet link*
https://research.microsoft.com/pubs/119060/WebAppSideChannel-final.pdf *Clearnet link*
Supposedly this type of attack works against Tor as well according to this study -
http://lorre.uni.lu/~andriy/papers/acmccs-wpes11-fingerprinting.pdf *Clearnet link*
But then Tor came out with an experimental defense -
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/3914 - *Clearnet link*
- to enable HTTP pipelining.
Tor goes on to say - We do not expect this defense to be foolproof. We create it as a prototype, and request that future research papers do not treat the defense as if it were the final solution against website fingerprinting of Tor traffic. In particular, not all websites support pipelining (in fact, an unknown number may deliberately disable it to reduce load), and even those that do will still leak the initial response size as well as the total response size to the attacker. Pipelining may also be disabled by malicious or simply misconfigured exits.
Questions:
What does this mean exactly? If I were attacked in this way what information could one get from me?
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bump
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Good question. I await a knowledgeable answer.
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I'm still awaiting an answer as well. Hopefully, one of the experts on this type of thing can help out here. Thanks.