{"ID":2854412,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14283","arxiv_id":"2510.14283","title":"Beyond a Single Perspective: Towards a Realistic Evaluation of Website Fingerprinting Attacks","abstract":"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 controlled experimental settings, most studies remain confined to single scenarios, overlooking the complexity of real-world environments. This paper presents the first systematic and comprehensive evaluation of existing WF attacks under diverse realistic conditions, including defense mechanisms, traffic drift, multi-tab browsing, early-stage detection, open-world settings, and few-shot scenarios. Experimental results show that many WF techniques with strong performance in isolated settings degrade significantly when facing other conditions. Since real-world environments often combine multiple challenges, current WF attacks are difficult to apply directly in practice. This study highlights the limitations of WF attacks and introduces a multidimensional evaluation framework, offering critical insights for developing more robust and practical WF attacks.","short_abstract":"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 controlled experimental settings, most studies remain confined to single scenarios, ove...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14283","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14283v1","authors":"[\"Xinhao Deng\",\"Jingyou Chen\",\"Linxiao Yu\",\"Yixiang Zhang\",\"Zhongyi Gu\",\"Changhao Qiu\",\"Xiyuan Zhao\",\"Ke Xu\",\"Qi Li\"]","published":"2025-10-16T04:14:17Z","proceeding":"cs.CR","tasks":"[\"cs.CR\",\"cs.AI\",\"cs.LG\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}