The “Traffic Protection” session at NDSS 2009

It is quite interesting that this year’s NDSS, has a special session on “Traffic Protection”. It contains two papers, one about attack (or stepping stone detection) and one on defense (or traffic analysis resistance).

The first paper from Anmir Houmansadr, Negar Kiyavash and Nikita Borisov proposes an active watermarking scheme for network flows, based on spread spectrum techniques, called RAINBOW.It seems like solid work, particularly when it comes to detectability. The authors use a statistical test to determine the covertness of the scheme, that might actually not be optimal for detection. I foresee that covertness would be the property to look at in order to break the scheme or improve on it. The full reference is:

• RAINBOW: A Robust And Invisible Non-Blind Watermark for Network Flows
  Amir Houmansadr, Negar Kiyavash, Nikita Borisov, NDSS, February 2009.

The second paper (presented as a write) is about Traffic Morphing, i.e. how to make encrypted traffic meta-data look like traffic of another class. Unlike anonymity solutions the aim is not to make all traffic look the same, but instead to fool a classifier. This is an interesting approach, but may open up an arms a race between traffic analysis resistance solutions, and those who build better and better classifiers. The full reference is:

• Traffic Morphing: An Efficient Defense Against Statistical Traffic Analysis. Charles Wright, MIT Lincoln Laboratory; Scott Coull, Johns HopkinsUniversity; Fabian Monrose, University of North Carolina, NDSS, February 2009.

(No pdf is yet available for the second work.)