Mitigating Proxy-Induced Traffic Drift in Website Fingerprinting via Model-Agnostic Traffic Tailoring
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Website fingerprinting (WF) based on deep learning can effectively identify websites from encrypted traffic. However, users often rely on proxy protocols to bypass censorship, and the diversity of these protocols poses a major challenge, as WF models trained on traffic from one set of protocols perform poorly when evaluated on that from unseen protocols. We attribute this issue to proxy-induced feature drift, where traffic patterns of the same website vary with the proxy protocol, leading to discrepancies that WF models fail to capture and severe performance degradation. To tackle this issue, we propose PA3, a model-agnostic preprocessing framework to analyze and mitigate the proxy-induced drift. PA3 first fingerprints the protocol-specific drift. These fingerprints are then used to tailor the proxied traffic for feature alignment, which mitigates the drift and considerably improves the generalization of WF models on traffic from unseen protocols. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that PA3 substantially enhances generalization on unseen protocols with an average improvement of 0.12 in F1-score (roughly 27% relative), achieving up to a 0.41 absolute gain across models, which narrows the performance gap introduced by the drift. In the best case, PA3 enables WF models to obtain F1-scores above 0.96 on traffic from unseen protocols.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Institutions: Southeast University, Southeast University, Tsinghua University
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204150138