TY - GEN
T1 - Forge
T2 - 35th ACM Web Conference, WWW 2026
AU - Huang, Yitan
AU - Qiao, Wei
AU - Wang, Ding
AU - Shen, Meng
AU - Zhao, Di
AU - Li, Linxu
AU - Cui, Susu
AU - Jiang, Bo
AU - Lu, Zhigang
AU - Liu, Baoxu
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2026 Owner/Author.
PY - 2026/4/12
Y1 - 2026/4/12
N2 - While Tor's strong anonymity shields users' privacy, it also enables malicious activities, motivating attacks that bypass its protections. Website Fingerprinting (WF) has emerged as a primary threat in this domain. However, existing WF methods struggle with realistic multi-tab browsing scenarios, often relying on prior knowledge of the number of open tabs and lacking robustness against network noise and defenses. To address these challenges, we propose Forge, a robust WF attack framework inspired by the classic cocktail party problem. Specifically, Forge reframes multi-tab WF as a task of Blind Source Separation(BSS), decomposing mixed traffic into individual signals without requiring a predefined number of concurrent tabs. A robust website identifier then classifies separated components using a dual-domain attention mechanism across time and frequency, allowing Forge to effectively resist WF defenses and network noise. We evaluate our model on a comprehensive collection of datasets covering open-world, defense-enabled, and dynamic scenarios. The results demonstrate that Forge can improve Mean Average Precision by 78.6% over the state-of-the-art average in the challenging multi-tab open-world scenario.
AB - While Tor's strong anonymity shields users' privacy, it also enables malicious activities, motivating attacks that bypass its protections. Website Fingerprinting (WF) has emerged as a primary threat in this domain. However, existing WF methods struggle with realistic multi-tab browsing scenarios, often relying on prior knowledge of the number of open tabs and lacking robustness against network noise and defenses. To address these challenges, we propose Forge, a robust WF attack framework inspired by the classic cocktail party problem. Specifically, Forge reframes multi-tab WF as a task of Blind Source Separation(BSS), decomposing mixed traffic into individual signals without requiring a predefined number of concurrent tabs. A robust website identifier then classifies separated components using a dual-domain attention mechanism across time and frequency, allowing Forge to effectively resist WF defenses and network noise. We evaluate our model on a comprehensive collection of datasets covering open-world, defense-enabled, and dynamic scenarios. The results demonstrate that Forge can improve Mean Average Precision by 78.6% over the state-of-the-art average in the challenging multi-tab open-world scenario.
KW - multi-tab attack
KW - privacy
KW - tor
KW - website fingerprinting
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105038596977
U2 - 10.1145/3774904.3792410
DO - 10.1145/3774904.3792410
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:105038596977
T3 - WWW 2026 - Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2026
SP - 3018
EP - 3029
BT - WWW 2026 - Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2026
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Y2 - 29 June 2026 through 3 July 2026
ER -