CUMUL & Co: High-Impact Artifacts for Website Fingerprinting Research

Abstract

Anonymous communication on the Internet is about hiding the relationship between communicating parties. At NDSS ‘16, we presented a new website fingerprinting approach, CUMUL, that utilizes novel features and a simple yet powerful algorithm to attack anonymization networks such as Tor. Based on pattern observation of data flows, this attack aims at identifying the content of encrypted and anonymized connections. Apart from the feature generation and the used classifier, we also provided a large dataset to the research community to study the attack at Internet scale. In this paper, we emphasize the impact of our artifacts by analyzing publications referring to our work with respect to the dataset, feature extraction method, and source code of the implementation. Based on this data, we draw conclusions about the impact of our artifacts on the research field and discuss their influence on related cybersecurity topics. Overall, from 393 unique citations, we discover more than 130 academic references that utilize our artifacts, 61 among them are highly influential (according to SemanticScholar), and at least 35 are from top-ranked security venues. This data underlines the significant relevance and impact of our work as well as of our artifacts in the community and beyond.

Publication
Cybersecurity Artifacts Competition and Impact Award at 38th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC '22)
Dr. rer. nat. Jan Pennekamp
Dr. rer. nat. Jan Pennekamp
Postdoctoral Researcher
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Andreas Zinnen
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Fabian Lanze
Klaus Wehrle
Klaus Wehrle
Head of Group
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Andriy Panchenko