Ablation experiments show that replacing ESPRESSO's transformer backbone with a CNN ('Modified DCF') while retaining time-aligned interval features achieves performance competitive with the full ESPRESSO model across most protocols (e.g., SOCAT network-mode pAUC 0.997 vs. 0.989 at FPR ≤ 10⁻³), demonstrating that the time-interval feature representation—not the transformer architecture—is the primary driver of correlation accuracy.

At operationally realistic base rates—1 million connection pairs per hour with only 10 true stepping-stone chains—a detector with a 1% FPR generates approximately 10,000 false alarms per hour while correctly flagging all 10 intrusions, making classical statistical methods (which cannot reach FPR ≪ 10⁻²) operationally unusable; deep learning methods must target FPR ≤ 10⁻³ to be viable.

§I evaluation

ESPRESSO achieves only TPR 0.132 at FPR ≤ 10⁻³ in network-mode for DNS-tunneled traffic—near chance—compared to TPR 0.992 for SSH traffic at the same threshold. The paper attributes this to the polling-based communication mechanism of dnscat2, which disrupts the timing patterns that interval-based flow correlation relies on.

§V-B, Table III detection

ESPRESSO, a deep learning flow correlator combining a transformer backbone with time-aligned interval features and online triplet mining, achieves TPR >0.99 at FPR ≤ 10⁻³ for SSH, SOCAT, and ICMP stepping-stone traffic in network-mode detection, versus DCF's TPR of 0.320–0.956 across those same protocols at the same threshold. On the harder mixed-protocol dataset in network-mode, ESPRESSO achieves TPR 0.748 at FPR ≤ 10⁻³, more than double DCF's 0.334.

§V-B, Table III evaluation

A systematic robustness evaluation found that ESPRESSO is highly robust to packet padding alone but that even modest artificial timing jitter causes significant performance degradation, identifying timing-based perturbations as the primary vulnerability of correlation-based stepping-stone (and by extension, anonymity-network) detectors.

§I (contributions), Abstract detection

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.

2026-fan-activeflowmark-assessing-tor §IV, §VI.D, Table III flow-correlationtraffic-shapeml-classifier

BM-Net achieves a 99.65% binary detection F1 score for distinguishing bandwidth-watermarked Tor flows from natural traffic, outperforming all evaluated baselines (next best: TikTok at 75.96% F1). The accuracy gap stems from active perturbation imposing a deterministic low-frequency throughput constraint rather than relying on subtle natural metadata, making the detection task fundamentally easier than passive website fingerprinting.

2026-fan-activeflowmark-assessing-tor §VI-D, Table III–IV flow-correlationtraffic-shapeml-classifier

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.

2026-fan-activeflowmark-assessing-tor §VI-D, Table III, Table V flow-correlationml-classifiertraffic-shape

BM-Net achieves a 97.5% macro-F1 score for fine-grained classification of three modulation geometries (sinusoidal, square-wave, triangular) from noisy exit-side Tor observations using only 201 labeled test samples collected across cross-continental Tor paths. Residual errors concentrate between natural traffic and square-wave modulation, as abrupt low-rate transitions are partially smoothed by Tor multiplexing and network jitter.

2026-fan-activeflowmark-assessing-tor §VI-D, Table V flow-correlationml-classifiertraffic-shape

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.

2026-fan-activeflowmark-assessing-tor §VI.D.2, Table V flow-correlationtraffic-shapeml-classifier

Automated proxy engines (e.g., Xray-core running VLESS Reality in automated mode) generate deterministically rigid inter-arrival time distributions because they cannot synthesize the stochastic variance of human-driven IAT, even when volumetrically anchored to benign distributions ('Fat Middle' anchoring via AMOI). The AEGIS Thermodynamic Variance Detector identifies this rigidity via Shannon Entropy of hidden states across 1,000-packet causal windows, rendering volumetric anchoring mathematically distinguishable from genuine human traffic.

2026-ferrel-aegis-adversarial-entropy-guided §III-E, §V-B ml-classifiertraffic-shapeflow-correlation