Evaluating practical QUIC website fingerprinting defenses for the masses

Website fingerprinting (WF) is a well-known threat to users' web privacy. New Internet standards, such as QUIC, include padding support defenses against WF. Previous work on QUIC WF only analyzes the effectiveness of when users are behind VPN. Yet, this not how most browse Internet. In paper, we provide comprehensive evaluation QUIC-padding-based directly web, i.e., without VPNs, HTTPS proxies, or other tunneling protocols. We confirm previous claims that network-layer cannot effective protection powerful adversaries capable observing all traffic traces. show hold even with constraints visibility and processing power. then current approach development, in which use third-party resources norm, impedes padding-based it requires first third parties coordinate order thwart analysis. coordination possible, cases, comes at high cost.