NATA (Non-invasive Active Traffic-correlation Analysis) requires no endpoint compromise, no Tor-browser modification, and no payload decryption. The adversary controls only an upstream network gateway (ISP/AS level) to impose bandwidth modulation on Tor TCP connections, and observes traffic at adversary-controlled exit relays — a Shaper–Sniffer architecture that operates purely at the network-infrastructure layer.

NATA (Non-invasive Active Traffic-correlation Analysis) injects low-frequency bandwidth waveforms (sinusoidal, square-wave, triangular) into Tor TCP connections at an upstream gateway without endpoint compromise, payload decryption, or Tor-browser modification. BM-Net, a selective state-space classifier trained on the exit-side observations, achieves a 99.65% binary detection F1 score distinguishing watermarked from natural traffic on a 20,000-trace real-world dataset.

§IV, §VI.D, Table III detection

BM-Net achieves a 99.65% binary detection F1 score distinguishing watermarked from natural Tor flows, and a 97.5% macro-F1 score for fine-grained modulation classification across sinusoidal, square-wave, and triangular patterns. The fine-grained test set contains 201 held-out samples collected from ten clients across five geographic regions (Europe, North America, Australia, Southeast Asia, East Asia), with training traces including traffic collected under WTF-PAD and Walkie-Talkie defenses.

§VI-D, Table III, Table V evaluation

Active bandwidth perturbation has an inherent detectability–stability trade-off: overly aggressive low-rate phases cause Tor SENDME-based flow control stalls, retransmissions, timeouts, or circuit replacement before sufficient correlation evidence is collected. The paper selects a 30-second modulation period and an empirically determined minimum shaping rate; the usable shaping range varies with relay load, path length, TCP congestion control behavior, and Tor multiplexing.

§VII-A detection

Using a 1%-scaled tornettools simulation with historical Tor consensus data, a single adversary-controlled exit relay at 148 Mbps yields an exit-observation probability of approximately 2.13%; deploying 5 adversary-controlled exit relays pushes observation probability above 10%. The aggregation effect is concave — repeated observations across T independent windows compound via 1 − (1 − Pcorr)^T.

§VI-A evaluation

Fine-grained modulation classification (natural vs. sinusoidal vs. square-wave vs. triangular) achieves 97.5% macro-F1 on a 201-sample held-out test set. Square-wave waveforms are the hardest class (F1 = 95.7%), while sinusoidal and triangular each reach 99.0% F1, because abrupt square-wave transitions are partially smoothed by Tor multiplexing and network dynamics.

§VI.D.2, Table V evaluation

Padding-based client-side defenses including WTF-PAD and Walkie-Talkie are insufficient against active bandwidth perturbation: they reshape packet timing and burst structure but cannot remove the upstream rate limit imposed by the gateway shaper. BM-Net trained on a defense-aware dataset containing both undefended and WTF-PAD/Walkie-Talkie traces still achieves 99.65% F1, and the paper explicitly notes that 'client-side padding and burst reshaping may alter the logical traffic pattern, but they do not directly remove the rate limit imposed by the upstream bottleneck.'

§VI.E.2, §VII detection

Using tornettools-based simulations with historical Tor consensus data scaled to 1% of the real network (80 relays), the adversary's exit-observation probability p̂exit grows monotonically with adversary-controlled bandwidth: a single exit relay at 148 Mbps yields p̂exit ≈ 2.13%, and 5 adversary-controlled exit relays push p̂exit above 10%.

§V.B, §VI.A evaluation

An infrastructure-level adversary must balance watermark detectability against connection stability: the paper's threat model requires a minimum shaping rate rmin to prevent Tor circuit stalls, timeouts, or circuit replacement, and notes that repeated poor-throughput events can cause the circuit to be abandoned before sufficient watermark evidence is accumulated. This detectability–stability trade-off constrains the practical attack to macroscopic (30-second) modulation periods rather than fine-grained packet-level timing manipulation.

§III.A, §VII.A detection

WTF-PAD and Walkie-Talkie client-side defenses — which operate on packet timing, padding, and burst-level structure — do not remove the throughput constraint imposed by an upstream rate limiter. When the shaping rate decreases, excess traffic is delayed, queued, or dropped; exit-side throughput retains the imposed modulation waveform. BM-Net was trained and evaluated on a dataset that includes both undefended and WTF-PAD/Walkie-Talkie-defended traces, confirming detection persists under this mixed condition.

§VI-E.2 detection

A three-stage detection pipeline exploiting the "dual-role" behavioral fingerprint of single-IP circumvention relays achieved 23.2% recall (96/414 ground-truth relays) with a 0.18% false-positive rate against 97,651 benign TLS servers, for an overall accuracy of 99.5%. The ground-truth set covered OpenVPN, WireGuard, and SOCKS relays identified in a 17 TB single-day backbone trace (WIDE Project, April 9, 2025).

2026-almutairi-server §3.4, Table 1 traffic-shapedpiflow-correlation

Multi-censor simulations show that single-censor-optimized distribution strategies perform suboptimally in realistic multi-region deployments. When two networks have different censor strategies (e.g., one optimal, one zig-zag), the distributor cannot detect that a proxy is blocked until all censors have blocked it; this leaves clients without reachable proxies despite the proxy appearing "available" from the distributor's view. The authors conclude that "single-censor evaluation does not accurately predict more realistic deployment performance." A zig-zag censor in one region with 0.25 weight caused 44.4% collateral damage while reducing proxy lifetime to a median of 4 steps.

2026-fares-game §6, Table 4 traffic-shapeflow-correlation

The zig-zag traffic analysis attack (confirmed supported in Geedge TSG leak) rapidly enumerates all static proxy pools. With ζ_watch ∈ {4, 6} steps and a best-quality classifier (ρ_TP=0.99, ρ_FP=0.001), almost total proxy enumeration and user blockage occurs well before step 300. Even ζ_watch=2 leaves ~50% of users blocked. Collateral damage is high across all settings when ζ_watch ≥ 4: eventually ~50% of innocent servers are also blocked. However, Snowflake-style ephemeral proxies resist zig-zag effectively: reachability remains above 95% after 360 steps because churn prevents the censor from expanding its known proxy set beyond agents' direct assignments.

2026-fares-game §5.1, Fig 3, Fig 4 traffic-shapeflow-correlation

Per-flow RTTdiff detection rates are only ~20% because the majority of proxy flows connect to CDN-cached content (Cloudflare, Google, Fastly) that sits within 5ms of the proxy, suppressing the discrepancy. However, aggregating across flows per website visit yields detection rates exceeding 70%—and from the abstract, approximately 80% of top-5K domains generate at least one detectable flow—with half of those detections made within the first 60 packets. This means an adversary can reliably expose client and proxy IPs after just a few website visits.

2025-xue-discriminative §VI-C-2, Table II traffic-shapeflow-correlation

IMAP/SSL traffic on port 993 constitutes less than 1% of total ISP traffic but accounts for nearly one third of all false positives in the RTTdiff exploit, because IMAP's non-RESTful multi-connection pattern violates the request-response correlation assumption. The overall per-flow FPR is bounded at 0.6–0.7% (on par with GFW's estimated FPR against fully-encrypted proxies), but implementing a pre-filter to whitelist IMAP traffic reduces the FPR by approximately one third, making the fingerprint substantially more precise.

2025-xue-discriminative §VI-C-3, Table III traffic-shapeflow-correlation

Cross-layer RTT discrepancy (RTTdiff) is a protocol-agnostic fingerprint that exploits an inherent architectural property of all proxy setups: transport-layer sessions terminate at the proxy while application-layer sessions remain end-to-end. Evaluation across 10 proxy protocols—including VMess, Shadowsocks, VLESS, Trojan, XTLS-Vision, and obfs4-wrapped SOCKS—shows near-identical detection rates for all except obfs4, confirming the fingerprint is not tied to any specific obfuscation scheme. At FPR=0.01, per-website detection rates exceed 70% across all tested client and proxy location combinations.

2025-xue-discriminative §I, §VI-C traffic-shapeflow-correlation