Multi-Level Resource-Coherented Graph Learning for Website Fingerprinting Attacks

Deep learning-based website fingerprinting (WF) attacks dominate website traffic classification. In the real world, the main challenges limiting their effectiveness are, on the one hand, the difficulty in countering the effect of content updates on the basis of accurate descriptions of page features in traffic representations. On the other hand, the model’s accuracy relies on training numerous samples, requiring constant manual labeling. The key to solving the problem is to find a website traffic representation that can stably and accurately display page features, as well as to perform self-supervised learning that is not reliant on manual labeling. This study introduces the multi-level resource-coherented graph convolutional neural network (MRCGCN), a self-supervised learning-based WF attack. It analyzes website traffic using resources as the basic unit, which are coarser than packets, ensuring the page’s unique resource layout while improving the robustness of the representations. Then, we utilized an echelon-ordered graph kernel function to extract the graph topology as the label for website traffic. Finally, a two-channel graph convolutional neural network is designed for constructing a self-supervised learning-based traffic classifier. We evaluated the WF attacks using real data in both closed- and open-world scenarios. The results demonstrate that the proposed WF attack has superior and more comprehensive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.