A New Security Mechanism to Perform Traffic Anonymity with Dummy Traffic Synthesis

Traffic analysis is a security attack where an adversary observes the statistical pattern of network traffic to infer sensitive information. Statistical properties such as packets length and inter-arrival time provide valuable information about an application, user´s activities, and an underlying system. On the other hand, traffic analysis is categorized as a passive attack that is difficult to detect. In this paper we develop an anonymity mechanism to help hiding user activity over a network. The mechanism provides synthesized dummy traffic generator (S-DTG) able to synthesize dummy traffic based on samples from real traffic during periods of user inactivity. The statistical properties and the traffic pattern of generated traffic are very similar to those of the real traffic sent during userspsila activity periods. The close similarity between real and dummy traffic coupled with the ability to generate traffic for an inactivity period of any length makes it difficult for an intruder to differentiate between periods of userspsila activity and inactivity. We show that our proposed traffic generator is superior to the exiting traffic generator from the point of providing anonymity and hiding user activity.