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. Google Chrome is required for Part 4 of this lab.