About a month ago Mullvad released Defense against AI-guided Traffic Analysis (DAITA) for their Windows client. In summary, DAITA consists of three components: the traffic analysis defense framework Maybenot, tailored defenses implemented in Maybenot, and (significant) integration efforts of Maybenot into Mullvad VPN’s stack.
I have been working with Mullvad on DAITA for a while, focusing on Maybenot and defense tooling. Maybenot is already open source, and so is Mullvad’s client integration. We have so much more stuff in the pipeline to share as open source and open access, but for now, I want to share some evaluation results from using the first eight DAITA servers from the perspective of a Windows client.
All servers run the same customized Maybenot defenses. Details on the actual defenses are another topic, but for now, it is enough to know that they are heavily randomized, and each WireGuard connection will likely behave quite differently.
We want to compare the eight servers regarding defense level and performance overheads. Being geographically distributed, we want to understand how the defenses perform in vastly different network conditions.