The Effectiveness of Privacy Enhancing Technologies against Fingerprinting

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of Privacy Enhancing Technologies against website fingerprinting using a hybrid experimental and observational approach, finding Tor to be most effective and highlighting inconsistencies in some PETs.

Contribution

Introduces a hybrid measurement method combining experimental control with observational scale to assess PET effectiveness against fingerprinting.

Findings

Tor Browser Bundle is the most effective PET tested.

Some PETs exhibit inconsistent behaviors that may reduce privacy.

Hybrid methodology improves assessment accuracy.

Abstract

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 tested. We find that some PETs have inconsistent behaviors, which can do more harm than good.