DEMUX: Boundary-Aware Multi-Scale Traffic Demixing for Multi-Tab Website Fingerprinting

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 17 Apr 2026] DEMUX: Boundary-Aware Multi-Scale Traffic Demixing for Multi-Tab Website Fingerprinting Yali Yuan, Yaosheng Liu, Qianqi Niu, Guang Cheng Website fingerprinting (WF) attacks infer the websites visited by users from encrypted traffic in anonymous networks such as Tor. Existing deep learning methods achieve high accuracy under the single-tab assumption but degrade substantially when users open multiple tabs concurrently, producing interleaved traffic that transforms WF into an implicit demixing problem. We identify three structural requirements for effective multi-tab demixing, namely signal integrity at segment boundaries, multi-scale local modeling, and relative temporal association of dispersed fragments, and show that no prior method satisfies all three simultaneously. We propose DEMUX, a designed framework that addresses these requirements through three tightly coupled components. A Boundary Preserving Aggregation Module employs overlapping window partitioning with joint packet-level and burst-level feature extraction. A Multi-Scale Parallel CNN captures heterogeneous temporal patterns via parallel branches. A two-stage Transformer encoder with Rotary Positional Embedding enables robust cross-window fragment association. The Boundary Preserving Aggregation Module additionally serves as a plug-and-play preprocessor that consistently improves existing baselines without architectural modification. Extensive experiments across closed-world, open-world, defense-augmented, dynamic-tab, and cross-configuration settings demonstrate that DEMUX achieves state-of-the-art performance. In the challenging closed-world 5-tab setting, DEMUX attains a P@5 of 0.943 and MAP@5 of 0.961, outperforming the strongest baseline by 9.2 and 6.2 percentage points respectively, confirming its strong robustness in complex multi-tab demixing scenarios. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2604.15677 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2604.15677v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.15677 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Qianqi Niu [view email] [v1] Fri, 17 Apr 2026 03:57:34 UTC (1,403 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)