ActiveFlowMark: Assessing Tor Anonymity under Active Bandwidth Watermarking

TL;DR

This paper presents NATA, an active traffic analysis method for Tor that injects distinguishable bandwidth patterns to improve traffic correlation without endpoint compromise.

Contribution

It introduces NATA and BM-Net, novel techniques for active bandwidth watermarking and detection, enhancing traffic analysis capabilities in low-latency anonymity networks.

Findings

BM-Net achieves 99.65% binary detection F1 score.

BM-Net attains 97.5% macro-F1 score for modulation classification.

Active bandwidth perturbation can serve as a side channel for traffic correlation.

Abstract

Low-latency anonymity networks such as Tor remain vulnerable to infrastructure-level traffic analysis that exploits side-channel information observable from encrypted communications. We introduce NATA, a non-invasive active traffic-correlation analysis algorithm that injects distinguishable throughput patterns into traffic flows through controlled bandwidth perturbations. Unlike passive correlation methods, NATA does not require endpoint compromise, Tor-browser modification, or packet-payload decryption or modification. It can be carried out by an adversary that controls an upstream network gateway and observes traffic at adversary-controlled exit relays. To identify perturbed flows under substantial network variability, we develop BM-Net (Bandwidth Modulation Network), a selective state-space learning framework adapted for bandwidth-modulation detection. Given the limited availability of high-fidelity ground truth on real-world cross-continental Tor paths, BM-Net adopts a data-efficient learning strategy that separates self-supervised representation learning from supervised task-specific classification. It first learns reusable traffic representations through masked pre-training on serialized traffic traces, and then adapts these representations to binary perturbation detection and fine-grained modulation classification using task-specific labeled data. Through real Tor traffic measurements, BM-Net achieves a 99.65% binary detection F1 score and a 97.5% macro-F1 score for fine-grained modulation classification under our evaluated settings. In addition, tornettools-based scaled simulations are used to estimate exit-observation probability under bandwidth-weighted relay selection. These results suggest that active bandwidth perturbation can serve as an infrastructure-level side channel for traffic correlation under a clearly defined adversary model.