HOLMES & WATSON: A Robust and Lightweight HTTPS Website Fingerprinting through HTTP Version Parallelism

Yifei Cheng, Yujia Zhu, Baiyang Li, peishuai sun, Yong Ding, Xinhao Deng, Qingyun Liu

Track: Security and privacy

Keywords: Website fingerprinting, HTTP version parallelism, Protocol analysis, Lazy learning

Abstract: Website Fingerprinting (WF) is a traffic analysis technique that aims to identify websites visited by users through the analysis of encrypted traffic patterns. Existing approaches often exhibit limited robustness against network variability and concept drift, resulting in significant performance degradation under real-world HTTPS conditions. Moreover, these methods typically require large-scale training datasets and substantial computational resources, which further increases the complexity of deployment. In this paper, we propose HOLMES, a novel approach that exploits HTTP version parallelism to extract enhanced application-layer features. These features, including the number of web resources transmitting in various HTTP versions, expose up to 4.28 bits of information—surpassing 98\% of previously reported features and demonstrate increased stability across varying network conditions. Complementary to this, we introduce WATSON, a lightweight classification method based on lazy learning, which substantially reduces the dependency on large training datasets. To further enhance the identification accuracy, we incorporate two fingerprint-specific distance metrics that ensure high intra-class similarity. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that HOLMES \& WATSON significantly enhance both robustness and efficiency, achieving an average accuracy of 87.7\% with only a single sample per website, marking an improvement of over 15\% compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Submission Number: 1202