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By "AI", surely they just mean traditional machine learning?

Or are people training neural nets on traffic analysis now?



Nope, "AI". The academic community working on one very active research area of traffic analysis, called website fingerprinting, made significant leaps with NNs over traditional ML in 2018: "Deep Fingerprinting: Undermining Website Fingerprinting Defenses with Deep Learning", by Sirinam et al., https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3243734.3243768 . Since then, the most powerful attacks here have used deep learning.

Broadly speaking, traffic analysis benefits a lot from work in computer vision: view a network trace as a one-dimensional picture. There are some fun visualizations here if you scroll down a bit: https://github.com/pylls/padding-machines-for-tor/tree/maste... . Every 1-pixel high line is a website visit, where each pixel corresponds to a packet (or cell in Tor) sent or received.




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