Timing Attacks Against Encrypted Web Traffic (HTTPS)

The basic idea is that when a web page is fetched it leads to a cascade of fetches as the various objects in the page (images, javascript, adverts etc) are fetched, and this cascade generates a timing signature within the resulting packet stream that can be used to identify the page fetched, even when the packets are encrypted and padded to be equal size. Importantly, this signature is robust -- so we can reliably identify the web page with high probability, even when measurements are taken in different locations etc.

• A First-Hop Traffic Analysis Attack Against Femtocells. Saman Feghhi, Douglas J. Leith, IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC), 2016
• Proportional Fair Rate Allocation for Private Shared Networks.Saman Feghhi, Douglas J. Leith, Mohammad Karzand. Proc IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC) 2016.
• A Web Traffic Analysis Attack Using Only Timing Information. Saman Feghhi, Douglas J. Leith. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security, in press. Data for this paper is available here.
• Time and Place: Robustness of a Traffic Analysis Attack Against Web Traffic. Saman Feghhi, Douglas J. Leith. IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC), 2017

Data & Code

The data and code used to demonstrate these attacks is here.

Defending Against Timing Attacks

• On Making Encrypted Web Traffic Resistant to Timing-Analysis Attacks. Saman Feghhi, Douglas J. Leith. Tech Report Oct 2016
• Trade-Off Between Rate and Delay in a Timing-Analysis Resistant Private Tunnel. Saman Feghhi, Douglas J. Leith. Tech Report Oct 2016

Data & Code

The data and code is here.