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Open Access Research Article Issue
Beyond a Single Perspective: Towards a Realistic Evaluation of Website Fingerprinting Attacks
Tsinghua Science and Technology 2026, 31(3): 1381-1392
Published: 19 December 2025
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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 0.9 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.

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