Few-Shot Website Fingerprinting Attack with Data Augmentation

This work introduces a novel data augmentation method for few-shot website fingerprinting (WF) attack where only a handful of training samples per website are available for deep learning model optimization. Moving beyond earlier WF methods relying on manually-engineered feature representations, more advanced deep learning alternatives demonstrate that learning feature representations automatically from training data is superior. Nonetheless, this advantage is subject to an unrealistic assumption that there exist many training samples per website, which otherwise will disappear. To address this, we introduce a model-agnostic, efficient, and harmonious data augmentation (HDA) method that can improve deep WF attacking methods significantly. HDA involves both intrasample and intersample data transformations that can be used in a harmonious manner to expand a tiny training dataset to an arbitrarily large collection, therefore effectively and explicitly addressing the intrinsic data scarcity problem. We conducted expensive experiments to validate our HDA for boosting state-of-the-art deep learning WF attack models in both closed-world and open-world attacking scenarios, at absence and presence of strong defense. For instance, in the more challenging and realistic evaluation scenario with WTF-PAD-based defense, our HDA method surpasses the previous state-of-the-art results by nearly 3% in classification accuracy in the 20-shot learning case. An earlier version of this work Chen et al. (2021) has been presented as preprint in ArXiv (https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.10063).