Re: [tor-talk] Would Conflux have a positive effect against website fingerprinting?

[Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Jul 14, 2013 at 11:28:25AM -0700, Mike Perry wrote:
> > Supposing it is applied does it help to prevent website fingerprinting
> > to a high extend? (high extend = being costly to circumvent by adversaries)
> 
> This was my estimation, too. Against passive adversaries, it should do
> quite well, especially since they should have no information (or at best
> incomplete information) about the Conflux path load balancing ratio for
> each circuit in the Conflux path, and which bridges are participating in
> which Conflux paths.

Good point -- I agree that it should help a lot against relay-level
(or in this case bridge-level) adversaries doing website fingerprinting
against the flows they see.

But it's far from clear to me that it will help much against an adversary
watching the user's network connection: in that case they get everything
they got before, if they just ignore which relay/bridge it's coming
through.

To phrase that as a research question: what part of successful website
fingerprinting comes from looking at the sizes of the objects fetched,
and what part comes from looking at timing? If you can do an adequate job
at website fingerprinting just from how many bytes flow in each direction,
then Conflux won't change things much.

And I bet you *can* do an adequate job right now just with size. But I
also bet that it's easier to make changes to Tor to foil an attack that
uses just size. More research required, as they say.

--Roger

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