Website Fingerprinting Lab

Learning Objectives

• Explore a new kind of side channel from a high level language.
• Understand how to reason about the root cause of misleading microarchitectural observations.
• Develop a real-world website fingerprinting attack that works on modern browsers.

Description In this lab, students implement the techniques from our group's ISCA 2022 paper There's Always a Bigger Fish: A Case Study of a Misunderstood Timing Side Channel. Students will begin by implementing a seemingly familiar cache-based side channel attack in Javascript, and will then be asked to reason about why this attack works. Then, students will remove a core part of the attack, but see that the code still works.

Setup Students can complete this lab on their own machines. MacOS, Linux, Windows all should work.