STMWF: Multi-Tab Website Fingerprinting via Spatial–Temporal Sequence Analysis

Website fingerprinting (WF) attacks are methods used to identify which websites a person visits even when they use Tor encryption (a privacy tool that hides browsing activity). Existing attacks work well when someone visits one website at a time, but struggle when multiple website tabs are open simultaneously. This research presents STMWF, a new attack that combines spatial-temporal sequence analysis (examining the order and timing of data packets sent between a user's computer and websites) with machine learning techniques to better identify websites even when multiple tabs are open, showing significant improvements over previous methods.