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Forge: A Robust Multi-tab Website Fingerprinting Attack via Blind Source Separation

  • Yitan Huang*
  • , Wei Qiao
  • , Ding Wang
  • , Meng Shen
  • , Di Zhao
  • , Linxu Li
  • , Susu Cui*
  • , Bo Jiang
  • , Zhigang Lu
  • , Baoxu Liu
  • *Corresponding author for this work
  • CAS - Institute of Information Engineering
  • Beijing Institute of Technology

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationWWW 2026 - Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2026
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages3018-3029
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)9798400723070
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 12 Apr 2026
Externally publishedYes
Event35th ACM Web Conference, WWW 2026 - Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Duration: 29 Jun 20263 Jul 2026

Publication series

NameWWW 2026 - Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2026

Conference

Conference35th ACM Web Conference, WWW 2026
Country/TerritoryUnited Arab Emirates
CityDubai
Period29/06/263/07/26

Keywords

  • multi-tab attack
  • privacy
  • tor
  • website fingerprinting

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