Keynote Speaker

Is Website Fingerprinting Actually Practical?
(joint keynote with the CBT workshop)

Abstract: Website fingerprinting is a traffic analysis technique that allows a local eavesdropper to learn information about the web pages visited over an encrypted channel. For the past two decades, the evaluations of website fingerprinting attacks presented in the academic literature have shown an ever-increasing accuracy. The consequences of such results, if they were to hold in practice, are alarming because they imply diminished privacy guarantees for web encryption protocols such as TLS and anonymity networks such as Tor. In the research community, there is a tension between works that show that the attacks are devastating, and others that show that such claims are inflated and that minimal defenses are required. In this talk, we will go through the dialogue between these two sides of the field and discuss the actual threat that website fingerprinting attacks pose to the privacy of web users.

Short Biography

Marc obtained his PhD in 2019 from the University of Leuven, Belgium. During his PhD he studied traffic analysis attacks and protocols that are resistant to it, with a focus on website fingerprinting attacks. He has also worked on censorship circumvention, privacy web search, and tracking in the web. Since October 2019, he is a Postdoc researcher in the University of Southern California where he is working on problems related to algorithmic bias and algorithmic fairness.