Network-Based Website Fingerprinting
draft-wood-pearg-website-fingerprinting-00
|
Document |
Type |
|
Active Internet-Draft (individual)
|
|
Last updated |
|
2019-11-04
|
|
Stream |
|
(None)
|
|
Intended RFC status |
|
(None)
|
|
Formats |
|
plain text
pdf
htmlized
bibtex
|
Stream |
Stream state |
|
(No stream defined) |
|
Consensus Boilerplate |
|
Unknown
|
|
RFC Editor Note |
|
(None)
|
IESG |
IESG state |
|
I-D Exists
|
|
Telechat date |
|
|
|
Responsible AD |
|
(None)
|
|
Send notices to |
|
(None)
|
pearg I. Goldberg
Internet-Draft University of Waterloo
Intended status: Informational T. Wang
Expires: May 7, 2020 HK University of Science and Technology
C. Wood
Apple, Inc.
November 04, 2019
Network-Based Website Fingerprinting
draft-wood-pearg-website-fingerprinting-00
Abstract
The IETF is well on its way to protecting connection metadata with
protocols such as DNS-over-TLS and DNS-over-HTTPS, and work-in-
progress towards encrypting the TLS SNI. However, more work is
needed to protect traffic metadata, especially in the context of web
traffic. In this document, we survey Website Fingerprinting attacks,
which are a class of attacks that use machine learning techniques to
attack web privacy, and highlight metadata leaks used by said
attacks. We also survey proposed mitigations for such leakage and
discuss their applicability to IETF protocols such as TLS, QUIC, and
HTTP. We endeavor to show that Website Fingerprinting attacks are a
serious problem that affect all Internet users, and we pose open
problems and directions for future research in this area.
Status of This Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-
Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on May 7, 2020.
Goldberg, et al. Expires May 7, 2020 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft Network-Based Website Fingerprinting November 2019
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2019 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must
include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
described in the Simplified BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Website Fingerprinting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4. Attacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
5. Base Rate Fallacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
6. Defenses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
7. Open Problems and Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
8. Protocol Design Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
9. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
10. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
11. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Appendix A. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
1. Introduction
Internet protocols such as TLS 1.3 [RFC8446] and QUIC
[I-D.ietf-quic-transport] bring substantial improvements to end-
users. The IETF engineered these with security and privacy in mind
by encrypting more protocol messages using modern cryptographic
primitives and algorithms, and engineering against flaws found in
previous protocols, yielding several desirable security properties,
including: forward-secure session key secrecy, downgrade protection,
key compromise impersonation resistance, and protection of endpoint
identities. Combined, these two protocols are set to protect a
significant amount of Internet data. However, significant metadata
leaks still exist for users of these protocols. Examples include
plaintext TLS SNI and application-specific extensions (ALPN), as well
as DNS queries. This information can be used by a passive attacker
to learn information about the contents of an otherwise encrypted
network connection. Recently, such information has also been studied
Show full document text