Websites generating only one or two observable non-Google DNS queries per visit have classification accuracy below 30% in DoHFuse's closed-world evaluation, compared to the model's overall 88.05% on 449 classes. Sites such as ftc.gov and ailawandorder.com fell near zero accuracy, revealing that extremely sparse DNS activity is a natural but uncontrolled defense against timing-based fingerprinting.

DoHFuse's dual-branch architecture outperforms all five baselines (KNN, Random Forest, FCNN+GRU, LSTM, Transformer) across 100-, 200-, and 449-class closed-world settings with standard deviations under 0.5 percentage points, while the vanilla Transformer's standard deviation exceeds 5 percentage points at 449 classes (mean 61.50%). This demonstrates that attention-based models without recurrence-scale adaptations are unsuitable for the burst–gap temporal dynamics of DoH/3, and that multi-scale gating (DMAG-LSTM) is the key architectural driver of robustness.

§V.C; Table II; Figure 6 evaluation

Under DoH/3, EDNS(0) padding and HTTP/3 framing collapse packet-length diversity: more than 99% of request packets fall within 233–350 bytes and more than 99% of response packets fall within 555–777 bytes. Direction-signed length-sequence classifiers (RF, LSTM, CNN) achieve only 67.39%, 8.95%, and 7.43% accuracy respectively on 449 classes — near or below random — confirming that size-based traffic analysis features lose nearly all discriminative power against DoH/3.

§IV.D; §V.B; Table I detection

DoHFuse achieves 88.05% accuracy (precision 88.56, recall 87.96, F1 87.83) fingerprinting 449 websites from DoH/3 traffic alone, demonstrating that EDNS(0) padding and QUIC/HTTP3 multiplexing are insufficient to prevent website fingerprinting. In the open-world setting, the model achieves AUPRC 0.975 with F1 0.951 (precision 0.906, recall 1.0), meaning every monitored site is detected while maintaining a low false-positive rate.

Abstract; §V.C; §V.E evaluation

Inter-arrival time sequences between client DoH/3 request packets retain site-specific temporal structure despite QUIC padding and stream multiplexing, exhibiting characteristic micro-burst and inter-burst gap patterns. Using timing features alone, LSTM achieves 83.75% ± 0.92% accuracy at 449 classes, and DoHFuse with its dual-branch DMAG-LSTM reaches 89.08% ± 0.49%, while length-only LSTM degrades to 8.95% under the same conditions.

§IV.D; §V.B; §V.C; Table II detection

Increasing Nym's per-hop mixing delay (λM) counterintuitively worsens WF resistance: without cover traffic, raising λM to 100 ms raises Tik-Tok F1 from 0.91 (no mixing) to 0.98. Larger delays create a visible temporal gap between outgoing request bursts and incoming response bursts, making the Transposition feature set leak 95.5% classifier accuracy versus 88.5% with no delay at all.

2026-joll-s-website-fingerprinting-nym §5.2, Table 4, Table 5 website-fingerprintml-classifiertraffic-shape

In controlled Testnet conditions, the Tik-Tok deep-learning WF attack achieves F1=0.87 (closed-world) and F1=0.83 (open-world) against Nym's default configuration, compared to F1=0.94/0.91 on Tor. On the live Mainnet, real-world network jitter reduces attack effectiveness to F1=0.69/0.71, but this comes at 11.93× latency overhead and 8.97× bandwidth overhead — a side-effect of instability rather than designed protection. The Mainnet drop is attributable to geographic node spread and roughly 5% packet retransmissions rather than to designed obfuscation.

2026-joll-s-website-fingerprinting-nym §5.1, Table 2 website-fingerprintml-classifier

Routing web traffic through Nym's constant-rate traffic stream (POISS-OFF) reduces Tik-Tok F1 to 0.06, with all feature-set leakage at ≤9.5% accuracy (Table 8), at the cost of latency overhead 7.32 and bandwidth overhead 8.06 (Table 7). Nym's 2,413-byte packet size means each cover packet incurs 4.7× the overhead of a Tor cover cell, making constant-rate defenses significantly more expensive in this architecture. This matches near-ideal Tamaraw protection on Tor, against WTF4Nym's F1 = 0.39 at 3.78x latency and 4.22x bandwidth.

2026-joll-s-website-fingerprinting-nym §6, Tables 7–8 website-fingerprintml-classifier

WTF4Nym, a burst-aware cover-traffic defense adapted to Nym's Poisson-rate architecture, reduces the Tik-Tok attack F1 score from 0.87 to 0.39 at moderate overhead (latency overhead 3.78×, bandwidth overhead 4.22×). This substantially outperforms directly applying WTF-PAD to Nym (F1=0.87), applying FRONT to Nym (F1=0.63), and the F1=0.65 achieved by FRONT on Tor at comparable overhead, by learning per-network burst distributions and injecting fake bursts that match those statistics. FRONT on Tor reaches F1 = 0.65 at 2.79x latency and 1.84x bandwidth, and under WTF4Nym the Time and N-gram feature leakage fall to 26.6% and 29.0% (Table 8).

2026-joll-s-website-fingerprinting-nym §6.2, Table 7 website-fingerprintml-classifier

Without chunk-based padding, an XGBoost classifier identifies the target website from covert data-chunk sizes with 91% accuracy (Tranco top-100). Chunking at 2 MB reduces accuracy to 12% at a 21.3% bandwidth overhead, while 16 MB chunks reduce accuracy to near random guessing at a 480.3% overhead. Chunks as small as 64 KB already reduce accuracy to 64%, demonstrating a monotonic fingerprinting–overhead tradeoff.

2026-kamali-huma §V-C, Figure 4 website-fingerprintml-classifier

Ephemeral defenses were integrated with a WireGuard fork and deployed as Mullvad VPN's 'DAITA' (Defense Against AI-guided Traffic Analysis) opt-in feature across Android, iOS, macOS, Linux, and Windows for over one year, serving a growing number of thousands of daily users. Individual defenses are derived deterministically from seeds in 43.6 ± 4.7 ms on a commodity laptop, making per-connection unique defenses practical at VPN scale.

2026-pulls-ephemeral-network-layer-fingerprinting §1, §7 ml-classifierwebsite-fingerprint