On countermeasures to traffic analysis attacks

Abstract

Absfrucf-This paper makes three contributions. First, we propose Shannon's perfect secrecy theory as a foundation for developing countermeasures to traffic analysis attacks on information security systems. A system violating the perfect secrecy conditions can leak mission critical information. Second, we suggest statistical pattern recognition as a fundamental technology to test an information system's security. This technology can cover a large category of testing approaches because of statistical pattern recognition's maturity and abundant techniques. Third, researchers have proposed traffic padding as countermeasures to traffic analysis attacks. By applying the proposed information assurance testing framework, we find that constant rate traffic padding does not satisfy Shannon's perfect secrecy conditions because of its implementation mechanism. We design a variant rate traffic padding strategy as an alternative, which is validated by both theoretical analysis and empirical results.

CS-BuFLO

“…They found that they could reduce their best attack's success rate to 5% (when guessing from 128 websites), at a bandwidth overhead of 400%. Fu, et al, found in early work that changes in CPU load can cause slight variations in the time between packets in schemes that attempt to send packets at fixed intervals, and recommended randomized inter-packet intervals instead [7].…”

“…• Past research by Fu, et al, showed that transmitting at fixed intervals can reveal load information at the sender, which an attacker can use to infer partial information about the data being transmitted [7].…”

Network Flow Watermarking Attack on Low-Latency Anonymous Communication Systems

“…Fu et al [13] analyzed the effectiveness of traffic padding in resisting traffic analysis and showed that constant rate traffic padding is not optimal. Gogolewski et al [14] investigated the implications when a user could only choose from a limited subset of all possible proxies in anonymous communication and showed that the anonymity could be degraded dramatically even if the set of all possible proxies was large.…”

Embedding covert information flow

“…The use of traffic analysis in computer and communication networks is well documented [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]. Traffic analysis has shown to expose security weaknesses of SSH [9] and web browsing [10], [6].…”