In the wake of increasing numbers of attacks on radio communication systems, a range of techniques are being deployed to increase the security of these systems. One such technique is radio fingerprinting, in which the transmitter can be identified and authenticated by observing small hardware differences expressed in the signal. Fingerprinting has been explored in particular in the defense of satellite systems, many of which are insecure and cannot be retrofitted with cryptographic security.
In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of radio fingerprinting techniques under interference and jamming attacks, usually intended to deny service. By taking a pre-trained fingerprinting model and gathering a new dataset in which different levels of Gaussian noise and tone jamming have been added to the legitimate signal, we assess the attacker power required in order to disrupt the transmitter fingerprint such that it can no longer be recognized. We compare this to Gaussian jamming on the data portion of the signal, obtaining the remarkable result that transmitter fingerprints are still recognizable even in the presence of moderate levels of noise. Through deeper analysis of the results, we conclude that it takes a similar amount of jamming power in order to disrupt the fingerprint as it does to jam the message contents itself, so it is safe to include a fingerprinting system to authenticate satellite communication without opening up the system to easier denial-of-service attacks.
Website fingerprinting enables an attacker to infer which web page a client is browsing through encrypted or anonymized network connections. We present a new website fingerprinting technique based on random decision forests and evaluate performance over standard web pages as well as Tor hidden services, on a larger scale than previous works. Our technique, k-fingerprinting, performs better than current state-of-the-art attacks even against website fingerprinting defenses, and we show that it is possible to launch a website fingerprinting attack in the face of a large amount of noisy data. We c…
Website fingerprinting enables a local eavesdropper to determine which websites a user is visiting over an encrypted connection. State-of-the-art website fingerprinting attacks have been shown to be effective even against Tor. Recently, lightweight website fingerprinting defenses for Tor have been proposed that substantially degrade existing attacks: WTF-PAD and Walkie-Talkie. In this work, we present Deep Fingerprinting (DF), a new website fingerprinting attack against Tor that leverages a type of deep learning called Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) with a sophisticated architecture desig…
As online tracking continues to grow, existing anti-tracking and fingerprinting detection techniques that require significant manual input must be augmented. Heuristic approaches to fingerprinting detection are precise but must be carefully curated. Supervised machine learning techniques proposed for detecting tracking require manually generated label-sets. Seeking to overcome these challenges, we present a semi-supervised machine learning approach for detecting fingerprinting scripts. Our approach is based on the core insight that fingerprinting scripts have similar patterns of API access whe…
This paper proposes a novel, non-linear collusion attack on digital fingerprinting systems. The attack is proposed for fingerprinting systems with finite alphabet but can be extended to continuous alphabet. We analyze the error probability of the attack for some classes of proposed random and deterministic schemes and obtain a bound on the number of colluders necessary to correctly estimate the host signal. That is, it requires fewer number of colluders to defeat the fingerprinting scheme. Our simulation results show that our attack is more powerful in practice than predicted by the theoretica…
Network fingerprinting is used to identify applications, provide insight into network traffic, and detect malicious activity. With the broad adoption of TLS, traditional fingerprinting techniques that rely on clear-text data are no longer viable. TLS-specific techniques have been introduced that create a fingerprint string from carefully selected data features in the client_hello to facilitate process identification before data is exchanged. Unfortunately, this approach fails in practice because hundreds of processes can map to the same fingerprint string. We solve this problem by presenting a…
Browser fingerprinting is a stateless tracking technique that attempts to combine information exposed by multiple different web APIs to create a unique identifier for tracking users across the web. Over the last decade, trackers have abused several existing and newly proposed web APIs to further enhance the browser fingerprint. Existing approaches are limited to detecting a specific fingerprinting technique(s) at a particular point in time. Thus, they are unable to systematically detect novel fingerprinting techniques that abuse different web APIs. In this paper, we propose FP-Radar, a machine…
Traffic analysis attacks to identify which web page a client is browsing, using only her packet metadata --- known as website fingerprinting --- has been proven effective in closed-world experiments against privacy technologies like Tor. However, due to the base rate fallacy, these attacks have failed in large open-world settings against clients that visit sensitive pages with a low base rate. We find that this is because they have poor precision as they were designed to maximize recall. In this work, we argue that precision is more important than recall for open-world website fingerprinting. …
Passive operating system fingerprinting reveals valuable information to the defenders of heterogeneous private networks; at the same time, attackers can use fingerprinting to reconnoiter networks, so defenders need obfuscation techniques to foil them. We present an effective approach for passive fingerprinting that uses data features from TLS as well as the TCP/IP and HTTP protocols in a multi-session model, which is applicable whenever several sessions can be observed within a time window. In experiments on a real-world private network, our approach identified operating system major and minor…
For model piracy forensics, previous model fingerprinting schemes are commonly based on adversarial examples constructed for the owner's model as the \textit{fingerprint}, and verify whether a suspect model is indeed pirated from the original model by matching the behavioral pattern on the fingerprint examples between one another. However, these methods heavily rely on the characteristics of classification tasks which inhibits their application to more general scenarios. To address this issue, we present MetaV, the first task-agnostic model fingerprinting framework which enables fingerprinting…
Online anonymity and privacy has been based on confusing the adversary by creating indistinguishable network elements. Tor is the largest and most widely deployed anonymity system, designed against realistic modern adversaries. Recently, researchers have managed to fingerprint Tor's circuits -- and hence the type of underlying traffic -- simply by capturing and analyzing traffic traces. In this work, we study the circuit fingerprinting problem, isolating it from website fingerprinting, and revisit previous findings in this model, showing that accurate attacks are possible even when the applica…
Website fingerprinting attacks enable an adversary to infer which website a victim is visiting, even if the victim uses an encrypting proxy, such as Tor. Previous work has shown that all proposed defenses against website fingerprinting attacks are ineffective. This paper advances the study of website fingerprinting attacks and defenses in two ways. First, we develop bounds on the trade-off between security and bandwidth overhead that any fingerprinting defense scheme can achieve. This enables us to compare schemes with different security/overhead trade-offs by comparing how close they are to t…
Recent studies have shown that Tor onion (hidden) service websites are particularly vulnerable to website fingerprinting attacks due to their limited number and sensitive nature. In this work we present a multi-level feature analysis of onion site fingerprintability, considering three state-of-the-art website fingerprinting methods and 482 Tor onion services, making this the largest analysis of this kind completed on onion services to date. Prior studies typically report average performance results for a given website fingerprinting method or countermeasure. We investigate which sites are more…
We present a simple yet potentially devastating and hard-to-detect threat, called Gummy Browsers, whereby the browser fingerprinting information can be collected and spoofed without the victim's awareness, thereby compromising the privacy and security of any application that uses browser fingerprinting. The idea is that attacker A first makes the user U connect to his website (or to a well-known site the attacker controls) and transparently collects the information from U that is used for fingerprinting purposes. Then, A orchestrates a browser on his own machine to replicate and transmit the s…
Database fingerprinting has been widely used to discourage unauthorized redistribution of data by providing means to identify the source of data leakages. However, there is no fingerprinting scheme aiming at achieving liability guarantees when sharing genomic databases. Thus, we are motivated to fill in this gap by devising a vanilla fingerprinting scheme specifically for genomic databases. Moreover, since malicious genomic database recipients may compromise the embedded fingerprint by launching effective correlation attacks which leverage the intrinsic correlations among genomic data (e.g., M…
This work presents two new construction techniques for q-ary Gossip codes from tdesigns and Traceability schemes. These Gossip codes achieve the shortest code length specified in terms of code parameters and can withstand erasures in digital fingerprinting applications. This work presents the construction of embedded Gossip codes for extending an existing Gossip code into a bigger code. It discusses the construction of concatenated codes and realisation of erasure model through concatenated codes.
The paper presents the results obtained during research on detection of unsolicited e-mails which are sent by botnets. The distinction from most of the existing solutions is the fact that the presented approach is based on the analysis of network traffic - the sequence and syntax of SMTP commands observed during email delivery process. The paper presents several improvements for detection of unsolicited email sources from different botnets (fingerprinting), which can be used during network forensic investigation.
Browser fingerprinting is a stateless identification technique based on browser properties. Together, they form an identifier that can be collected without users' notice and has been studied to be unique and stable. As this technique relies on browser properties that serve legitimate purposes, the detection of this technique is challenging. While several studies propose classification techniques, none of these are publicly available, making them difficult to reproduce. This paper proposes a new browser fingerprinting detection technique. Based on an incremental process, it relies on both autom…
Modern smartphones contain motion sensors, such as accelerometers and gyroscopes. These sensors have many useful applications; however, they can also be used to uniquely identify a phone by measuring anomalies in the signals, which are a result from manufacturing imperfections. Such measurements can be conducted surreptitiously in the browser and can be used to track users across applications, websites, and visits. We analyze techniques to mitigate such device fingerprinting either by calibrating the sensors to eliminate the signal anomalies, or by adding noise that obfuscates the anomalies. T…
We measure how effective Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) are at protecting users from website fingerprinting. Our measurements use both experimental and observational methods. Experimental methods allow control, precision, and use on new PETs that currently lack a user base. Observational methods enable scale and drawing from the browsers currently in real-world use. By applying experimentally created models of a PET's behavior to an observational data set, our novel hybrid method offers the best of both worlds. We find the Tor Browser Bundle to be the most effective PET amongst the set …
We compute the channel capacity of non-binary fingerprinting under the Marking Assumption, in the limit of large coalition size c. The solution for the binary case was found by Huang and Moulin. They showed that asymptotically, the capacity is $1/(c^2 2\ln 2)$, the interleaving attack is optimal and the arcsine distribution is the optimal bias distribution. In this paper we prove that the asymptotic capacity for general alphabet size q is $(q-1)/(c^2 2\ln q)$. Our proof technique does not reveal the optimal attack or bias distribution. The fact that the capacity is an increasing function of q …
Web Application finger printing is a quintessential part of the Information Gathering phase of (ethical) hacking. It allows narrowing down the specifics instead of looking for all clues. Also an application that has been correctly recognized can help in quickly analyzing known weaknesses and then moving ahead with remaining aspects. This step is also essential to allow a pen tester to customize its payload or exploitation techniques based on the identification so to increase the chances of successful intrusion. This paper presents a new tool "W3-Scrape" for the relatively nascent field of Web …
In this paper, we propose a novel paper fingerprinting technique based on analyzing the translucent patterns revealed when a light source shines through the paper. These patterns represent the inherent texture of paper, formed by the random interleaving of wooden particles during the manufacturing process. We show these patterns can be easily captured by a commodity camera and condensed into to a compact 2048-bit fingerprint code. Prominent works in this area (Nature 2005, IEEE S&P 2009, CCS 2011) have all focused on fingerprinting paper based on the paper "surface". We are motivated by the ob…
Tor provides low-latency anonymous and uncensored network access against a local or network adversary. Due to the design choice to minimize traffic overhead (and increase the pool of potential users) Tor allows some information about the client's connections to leak. Attacks using (features extracted from) this information to infer the website a user visits are called Website Fingerprinting (WF) attacks. We develop a methodology and tools to measure the amount of leaked information about a website. We apply this tool to a comprehensive set of features extracted from a large set of websites and…
Database fingerprinting have been widely adopted to prevent unauthorized sharing of data and identify the source of data leakages. Although existing schemes are robust against common attacks, like random bit flipping and subset attack, their robustness degrades significantly if attackers utilize the inherent correlations among database entries. In this paper, we first demonstrate the vulnerability of existing database fingerprinting schemes by identifying different correlation attacks: column-wise correlation attack, row-wise correlation attack, and the integration of them. To provide robust f…
With this paper, we survey the research performed in the domain of browser fingerprinting, while providing an accessible entry point to newcomers in the field. We explain how this technique works and where it stems from. We analyze the related work in detail to understand the composition of modern fingerprints and see how this technique is currently used online. We systematize existing defense solutions into different categories and detail the current challenges yet to overcome.
Software-defined networking (SDN) eases network management by centralizing the control plane and separating it from the data plane. The separation of planes in SDN, however, introduces new vulnerabilities in SDN networks since the difference in processing packets at each plane allows an adversary to fingerprint the network's packet-forwarding logic. In this paper, we study the feasibility of fingerprinting the controller-switch interactions by a remote adversary, whose aim is to acquire knowledge about specific flow rules that are installed at the switches. This knowledge empowers the adversar…
We propose randomized frameproof codes for content protection, which arise by studying a variation of the Boneh-Shaw fingerprinting problem. In the modified system, whenever a user tries to access his fingerprinted copy, the fingerprint is submitted to a validation algorithm to verify that it is indeed permissible before the content can be executed. We show an improvement in the achievable rates compared to deterministic frameproof codes and traditional fingerprinting codes. For coalitions of an arbitrary fixed size, we construct randomized frameproof codes which have an $O(n^2)$ complexity va…
Users' website browsing history contains sensitive information, like health conditions, political interests, financial situations, etc. Some recent studies have demonstrated the possibility of inferring website fingerprints based on important usage information such as traffic, cache usage, memory usage, CPU activity, power consumption, and hardware performance counters information. However, existing website fingerprinting attacks demand a high sampling rate which causes high performance overheads and large network traffic, and/or they require launching an additional malicious website by the us…
Combining an information-theoretic approach to fingerprinting with a more constructive, statistical approach, we derive new results on the fingerprinting capacities for various informed settings, as well as new log-likelihood decoders with provable code lengths that asymptotically match these capacities. The simple decoder built against the interleaving attack is further shown to achieve the simple capacity for unknown attacks, and is argued to be an improved version of the recently proposed decoder of Oosterwijk et al. With this new universal decoder, cut-offs on the bias distribution functio…
University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）；University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）；Shandong University（山东大学）
The Radio frequency (RF) fingerprinting technique makes highly secure device authentication possible for future networks by exploiting hardware imperfections introduced during manufacturing. Although this technique has received considerable attention over the past few years, RF fingerprinting still faces great challenges of channel-variation-induced data distribution drifts between the training phase and the test phase. To address this fundamental challenge and support model training and testing at the edge, we propose a federated RF fingerprinting algorithm with a novel strategy called model …
