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Website Fingerprinting (WFP) uses deep learning models to classify encrypted network traffic to infer visited websites. While historically effective, prior methods fail to generalize to modern web environments. Single-page applications…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-17 Chuxu Song , Dheekshith Dev Manohar Mekala , Hao Wang , Richard Martin

Digital fingerprints have brought great convenience and benefits to many online businesses. However, they pose a significant threat to the privacy and security of ordinary users. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of current…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Kaitong Lin , Huazhu Cao , Amin Milani Fard

This articles surveys the existing literature on the methods currently used by web services to track the user online as well as their purposes, implications, and possible user's defenses. A significant majority of reviewed articles and web…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2015-07-29 Tomasz Bujlow , Valentín Carela-Español , Josep Solé-Pareta , Pere Barlet-Ros

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Antonin Durey , Pierre Laperdrix , Walter Rudametkin , Romain Rouvoy

Website Fingerprinting (WF) attacks exploit patterns in encrypted traffic to infer the websites visited by users, posing a serious threat to anonymous communication systems. Although recent WF techniques achieve over 90% accuracy in…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Xinhao Deng , Jingyou Chen , Linxiao Yu , Yixiang Zhang , Zhongyi Gu , Changhao Qiu , Xiyuan Zhao , Ke Xu , Qi Li

Stateful and stateless web tracking gathered much attention in the last decade, however they were always measured separately. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to detect and measure cookie respawning with browser and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-05-11 Imane Fouad , Cristiana Santos , Arnaud Legout , Nataliia Bielova

How easy is it to uniquely identify a person based solely on their web browsing behavior? Here we show that when people navigate the Web, their online traces produce fingerprints that identify them. Merely the four most visited web domains…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2024-06-17 Marcos Oliveira , Junran Yang , Daniel Griffiths , Denis Bonnay , Juhi Kulshrestha

Website Fingerprinting (WFP) has traditionally focused on inferring which website a user visits from encrypted traffic metadata such as packet sizes and timing. In this paper, we identify and quantify a new privacy risk in modern web…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Chuxu Song , Hao Wang , Richard Martin

It is generally recognized that the traffic generated by an individual connected to a network acts as his biometric signature. Several tools exploit this fact to fingerprint and monitor users. Often, though, these tools assume to access the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2014-02-11 Nino Vincenzo Verde , Giuseppe Ateniese , Emanuele Gabrielli , Luigi Vincenzo Mancini , Angelo Spognardi

Several studies have shown that the network traffic that is generated by a visit to a website over Tor reveals information specific to the website through the timing and sizes of network packets. By capturing traffic traces between users…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2017-12-06 Vera Rimmer , Davy Preuveneers , Marc Juarez , Tom Van Goethem , Wouter Joosen

Understanding user behavior is essential to personalize and enrich a user's online experience. While there are significant benefits to be accrued from the pursuit of personalized services based on a fine-grained behavioral analysis, care…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2015-04-09 Tiep Mai , Deepak Ajwani , Alessandra Sala

Website fingerprinting attack is an extensively studied technique used in a web browser to analyze traffic patterns and thus infer confidential information about users. Several website fingerprinting attacks based on machine learning and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-02-28 Guodong Huang , Chuan Ma , Ming Ding , Yuwen Qian , Chunpeng Ge , Liming Fang , Zhe Liu

The possibility of fingerprinting the search keywords issued by a user on popular web search engines is a significant threat to user privacy. This threat has received surprisingly little attention in the network traffic analysis literature.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-08-20 Junhua Yan , Hasan Faik Alan , Jasleen Kaur

Numerous studies demonstrated that browser fingerprinting is detrimental to users' security and privacy. However, little is known about the effects of browser fingerprinting on Android hybrid apps -- where a stripped-down Chromium browser…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-08-04 Abhishek Tiwari , Jyoti Prakash , Alimerdan Rahimov , Christian Hammer

On the modern web, trackers and advertisers frequently construct and monetize users' detailed behavioral profiles without consent. Despite various studies on web tracking mechanisms and advertisements, there has been no rigorous study…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Zahra Moti , Asuman Senol , Hamid Bostani , Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius , Veelasha Moonsamy , Arunesh Mathur , Gunes Acar

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-10-20 Zengrui Liu , Prakash Shrestha , Nitesh Saxena

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Pierre Laperdrix , Nataliia Bielova , Benoit Baudry , Gildas Avoine

Device fingerprinting is a widely used technique that allows a third party to identify a particular device. Applications of device fingerprinting include authentication, attacker identification, or software license binding. Device…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-09-18 Alberto Fernandez-de-Retana , Igor Santos-Grueiro

The collapse of social contexts has been amplified by digital infrastructures but surprisingly received insufficient attention from Web privacy scholars. Users are persistently identified within and across distinct Web contexts, in varying…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Ido Sivan-Sevilla , Parthav Poudel

Accurately analyzing and modeling online browsing behavior play a key role in understanding users and technology interactions. In this work, we design and conduct a user study to collect browsing data from 31 participants continuously for…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2021-08-17 Yuliia Lut , Michael Wang , Elissa M. Redmiles , Rachel Cummings