Slitheen++ achieves a median covert site loading time of 7 seconds in the naive setup, rising to 8 seconds with crawling and 13 seconds with a 1-second thinking-time (TT) delay. The Baseline-to-Covert factor ranges from 3.7–8.5 without TT and from 7.6–21.4 when crawling and 1-second TT are combined, reflecting the fundamental tradeoff between stealth overt behavior and covert throughput.
From 2020-birtel-slitheen — Slitheen++: Stealth TLS-based Decoy Routing
· §5 (Figure 1, Figure 2)
· 2020
· Free and Open Communications on the Internet
Implications
Decoy routing deployments must explicitly surface the stealth/performance tradeoff; the 1.9–2.6× slowdown from stealth overt behavior is unavoidable under current designs and will affect user retention.
Predefined crawl URL lists that guarantee high covert goodput—rather than random link-following—could reduce loading-time variance without sacrificing the detectability gains from varied browsing patterns.