Network address hopping: a mechanism to enhance data protection for packet communications

This paper proposes a novel mechanism to enhance data protection in communications across untrusted networks. The approach is based on the principle of network address hopping, whereby a data stream is spread across multiple end-to-end connections. The aim is to obscure the data exchange between two peers by shuffling the communication pattern. The hopping pattern - a shared secret between the communication participants - defines the sequence for the address hopping and determines the data spreading. Besides a description of the basic operation of the network address hopping mechanism, the paper evaluates the level of protection it can offer for end-to-end communications. This theoretical analysis is accompanied by a quantitative evaluation of the processing overhead of our prototype implementation on commodity end hosts.