Please note: This PhD seminar will take place online.
Michael Wrana, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
Supervisors: Professors Diogo Barradas & N. Asokan
The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) enables decentralized, censorship-resilient web content distribution, yet its resistance to website fingerprinting (WF) remains largely unexplored. We present the first systematic WF evaluation of IPFS using 40,000 browser-driven traces spanning 100 monitored and 10,000 unmonitored websites, direct Kubo retrievals, Tor gateway access, and single- and multi-tab settings. Across seven attacks, undefended IPFS traffic remains highly vulnerable to WF, with accuracy reaching 97.1%. Existing Tor-oriented defenses transfer poorly because IPFS traffic exhibits distinct timing and directional characteristics. We therefore introduce IPFSCover, a WF defense that coarsens packet timing and inserts direction-aware dummy traffic. IPFSCover reduces IPFS WF attack accuracy by up to 40% and outperforms existing WF defenses in nearly every evaluated comparison.
Attend this PhD seminar virtually on Microsoft Teams.