Privacy and Anonymity in Communication, Mobile, and Ad-hoc Networks
In the presence of ever increasing volumes of traffic, legal threats by copyright holders, and QoS demands of customers, network service providers are urged to apply traffic classification and shaping techniques. Such actions violate the End-to-End and Net Neutrality principles and thus threaten freedom of speech and the foundations of democracy.
In this project we strive to enhance privacy and anonymity in communication networks. We show that the user vs ISP war consumes vast amounts of resources on both sides while not delivering noteworthy results. As a countermeasure, we argue that future traffic classification systems must move from syntax- to semantic-based methods. We develop The Any Signature Protocol (TASP), which is capable of hiding information within any desired protocol signature thus appearing as totally different traffic.
Publications
2012
- Thomas Zink, Marcel Waldvogel: BitTorrent Traffic Obfuscation: a Chase towards Semantic Traffic Identification. 12th IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing, P2P'12, 2012, Tarragona, Spain, September 3 - September 5.
- Thomas Zink, Marcel Waldvogel: Efficient BitTorrent handshake obfuscation. Publ. in: Proceedings of the First Workshop on P2P and Dependability: P2P-Dep '12; Sibiu, Romania, May 08-11, 2012 / Sens, Pierre... (Eds.). - New York : ACM, 2012. - Nr. 2. - ISBN 978-1-4503-1148-9.