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22.12.2022 15:31 Age: 1 year

CUMUL & Co: ACSAC Artifact Competition Finalist


At ACSAC 2022 earlier this month, COMSYS researcher Jan Pennekamp presented on “CUMUL & Co: High-Impact Artifacts for Website Fingerprinting Research”, a finalist entry to the ACSAC Cybersecurity Artifacts Competition. With this competition, for the first time this year, ACSAC, the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, awards impactful artifacts in the security and privacy research communities.

In the case of CUMUL, the artifact was originally published together with an NDSS 2016 paper on Website Fingerprinting at Internet Scale. Both artifact and paper were met with interest from the community, attracting almost 400 citations to date. Out of these, more than 130 academic references (at least 35 from top-ranked security venues) also utilized the artifact.

The NDSS paper looks into the scalabiliy of website fingerprinting attacks on Tor users and challenges conclusions of prior work. Back then, the work looked at the largest and most realistic datasets to study these attacks. Moreover, the paper proposed a novel feature set called CUMUL that is both intuitive (interpolating a cumulative trace of the page load) and efficient to compute. The numbers presented in the ACSAC artifact competition surely underline the impact and relevance of this work. The artifacts are freely available.

We feel honored to have been chosen as one of 5 finalist entries, among very strong competition. For more information on the finalists and winners, please refer to the ACSAC website.


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