Defending against Deep-Learning-Based Flow Correlation Attacks with Adversarial Examples

Tor is vulnerable to flow correlation attacks, adversaries who can observe the traffic metadata (e.g., packet timing, size, etc.) between client to entry relay and exit relay to the server will deanonymize users by calculating the degree of association. A recent study has shown that deep-learning-based approach called DeepCorr provides a high flow correlation accuracy of over 96%. The escalating threat of this attack requires timely and effective countermeasures. In this paper, we propose a novel defense mechanism that injects dummy packets into flow traces by precomputing adversarial examples, successfully breaks the flow pattern that CNNs model has learned, and achieves a high protection success rate of over 97%. Moreover, our defense only requires 20% bandwidth overhead, which outperforms the state-of-the-art defense. We further consider implementing our defense in the real world. We find that, unlike traditional scenarios, the traffic flows are “fixed” only when they are coming, which means we must know the next packet’s feature. In addition, the websites are not immutable, and the characteristics of the transmitted packets will change irregularly and lead to the inefficiency of adversarial samples. To solve these problems, we design a system to adapt our defense in the real world and further reduce bandwidth overhead.